


3.08 Robbing the Memory Bank

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Control, Supernatural - Freeform, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 07:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13631859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: When Dipper and Wendy decide to return to the Hall of the Forgotten to review the stolen memories of people in town, they inadvertently discover that with memories, troubles often come, too. This product includes Wendip.





	3.08 Robbing the Memory Bank

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Gravity Falls or its characters. I write these stories for fun, practice, and, I hope, to entertain fans. I make no money from writing them.

**Robbing the Memory Bank**

**By William Easley**

**(June 2015)**

* * *

**1: Out of the Vault**

Dipper had carried the intent around in his head for months. He talked it over with his Lumberjack Girl, who said, "I think it's something we gotta do. I'm with you on this one."

However, what with Mermando's call for help and the mystery of the missing werewolf mommy, he had let it slide. The morning after he had given Wendy a copy of his book, though, he asked her if she thought they should start.

"Whenever you're ready," she'd told him. "Tonight's fine with me, after I cook dinner for my family and clean up the dishes. Hey, want to come and help?"

He did, and they did—the dishes, that is—so finally, on Saturday night, he and Wendy agreed to begin. To talk it over, they had gone out back to the boys' old swing set—Manly Dan had made it himself, of tree boles and logging chains, and it probably would last a thousand years—and, sitting side by side in the swings, they considered options. "Should we take Mabel with us?" Wendy asked.

Dipper shook his head. "I've thought and thought about that, and it's best we don't, at least not at the beginning. I know exactly what she would do, and it would only wind up depressing her. Maybe once you and I have cleared out some of the dangerous stuff, she might come along—but tonight, no."

"Yeah, you're right," Wendy agreed. "OK, how do we get in?"

"With this." Dipper held up the President's Key, which he wore on a string around his neck. Entrusted to him by the discoverer of Gravity Falls Valley himself, the 8 ½ President of the Several United States, Sir Lord Quentin Trembley III, Esquire, to whom Dipper still owed twelve dollars (never accept a negative-denomination piece of currency), the key would open any lock!

Um—any lock it fit, that is. Obviously, keypad locks and card locks and fingerprint locks and the locks of the Panama Canal were clean out of the question. So were modern padlocks, most door locks, and so on and so forth. However, the key  _would_  open any lock produced in the United States prior to the year 1860, and quite a few after that. Luckily, the architect who had built the Gravity Falls Museum of History had used antique doors for two entrances and had never changed out the locks. Dipper had already experimented, and the President's Key would get them in.

However, the Museum had a sophisticated security system. Dipper had made frequent visits every day since he and Mabel had returned to begin their fourth summer in Gravity Falls, though, and he had found a way to disarm the alarm.

That Saturday, then, after their chores and after dark, Wendy and Dipper donned—separately—their ninja costumes. Well, not really ninja costumes, but close enough: black turtlenecks, black tight jeans, black sneakers, clothing given to them by a clandestine Agency which operated on two principles:

1\. This Agency investigates and combats any and all real or potential paranormal threats to the USA.

2\. This Agency does not exist.

Anyway, Agents from the hush-hush Agency had cut Dipper's and Wendy's clothes off them (they were saving the teens' lives, not being pervy) and had replaced their normal wear with these togs. All that remained was for Wendy to find them black balaclavas, those over-the-head ski masks, and  _voilá! les parfaits petits ninjas, très adorables, n'est-ce pas?_  Sorry, sorry, got carried away with  _voilá,_  my heart is in Paris. I meant, "hey, they were perfect little ninjas! Quite adorable, don't you think?"

"Actually," Dipper said as Wendy parked the car around the corner from the Museum, "I looked it up, and we're not really dressed like ninjas. I mean, we sort of are? But ninjas don't wear black."

"Get out of town!" Wendy said. "Every movie I've ever seen a ninja in—"

"Yeah,  _movie_ ninjas," Dipper said. "Real ninjas usually wore dark blue, or else kind of a yellowish-red. Dull orange, I guess."

"No kidding? How come?" They quietly got out of the car and slipped behind a hedge that ran up toward the Museum's back door.

"Well, it turns out that black shows up more in a dim light than a dark blue does. And the orangey uniform resembled traditional farmer's clothes, so if a ninja was out in the daytime, he—"

"Or she."

"Right, she, could mingle with farmers and not be discovered."

Wendy gave him a mock shoulder punch. "Huh. Shatter my illusions, why don't you?

They reached the back door, Dipper took out the President's Key, and he silently unlocked and opened the entrance. They slipped inside a storage room, closed the door again, and locked it behind them. "The security system," Wendy whispered.

"I'm on it. Wait here." Dipper glided silently out into a hallway. The Museum didn't have a night watchman on staff—Gravity Falls was, by and large, a law-abiding town, which was fortunate considering the police force there, and most people didn't even lock their doors, except on nights when the Gnomes were having a scavenger hunt or the Night Nickers were in heat.

Wendy counted to five hundred, slowly, and then the hall door opened again, and Dipper whispered, "It's cool. Come on."

Wendy joined him in the hallway, lit only by a weak security light, and bent over to pet the security system. "How ya doin' there, Ripper? Who's a good boy?"

Ripper, a ninety-five pound Doberman, wagged his butt, his tail being only a stump so short it was more like a button. Fierce though his breed could be, Ripper was a sucker for chunks of steak, and Dipper had quickly become his best buddy and his connection. He contentedly padded along with the teens to the eyeball room, saw them through the secret door, and then, presumably, went on with his rounds, guarding the Museum against any wrongdoers, which Ripper defined as anybody who didn't have baggies with little steak bites in their pockets.

Months before, Wendy had organized the memory tubes alphabetically. "Got the popcorn?" Wendy asked.

"In my backpack. Got the sodas?"

"Ditto."

"Here we go." They sat on the floor in front of the viewer and Dipper picked up a tube.

The first set of memories that years ago had been stolen by the Society of the Blind Eye belonged to Alice Aarons, whom the teens didn't even know. Dipper popped the tube into the player, and they settled down as if it were movie night.

"This is an oldie," Dipper said, munching popcorn. Blind Ivan looked younger—though he didn't have hair even at that age—and the clothes seemed to be early 1990s vintage. "Alice Adams," Ivan intoned, sounding a little like the Star Trek captain on the old Next Generation shows, "what have you seen?"

"My underwear came alive!" the woman, about thirty-five, tall and plain, said. "It chased me all around the room!"

Her memory began to play out. She had a basket of clean laundry on her bed and began to sort it. She held up a pair of yellow panties with blue polka dots. "I don't remember buying these!"

And then the underthings revolted. The panties inflated, leaped out of her hands, and on its short legs began to run waddling around the floor like an animated balloon, gibbering. Then a garishly colored bra flapped its cups and flew into the air and dive-bombed her. And Alice Aarons ran screaming from her bedroom and from the house—

Then she was back in the chair, Blind Ivan looming over her. Caressing the memory gun, he said, "You will be troubled no longer," and a flash of light hit her. The screen faded to black.

"Creepy! What was that biz all about?" Wendy asked.

"Don't know," Dipper admitted. "Not the Shapeshifter. Maybe the underwear really was made of Flimsies. Those are kind of living sheets of bio-fabric material. They grow in caves on damp rocks, and then when they're mature, they peel off and can crawl around and fly, sort of. Like handkerchiefs blowing on the wind. They can have patterns, but why anybody would make underwear out of them—" he shrugged. "Keeper or lose it?"

"Dude," Wendy said, "if  _my_  underthings did that, I wouldn't want to know about it. Erase this one."

They had agreed: with the Society of the Blind Eye defunct, and with the citizens of Gravity Falls making a reasonable adjustment to the assorted weirdnesses, Wendy and Dipper would review the dormant memories, destroy the ones that seemed to be dispensable, and offer to the victims of the Society the chance to recover their lost recollections if the memories seemed to be important ones.

They'd earlier discovered they could do that with a minor one—Soos catching sight of something the Society did not want him to see—and had let Soos see, and therefore recover, that memory. Soos had laughed. "I'd, like, totally forgotten that, dawgs! I thought when we busted in that summer, that was the only time I'd ever seen those goofy guys. But it turns out it was the second time, 'cause they erased the memory of the first time, so the second time became like the first time—oh, man, remember that great song, 'Straight Blanchin'?'"

Dipper had to wrestle the memory gun out of Wendy's grasp.

Now they were going to watch a dozen or so memories every viewing night and judge whether to restore them to their original, uh, rememberers. "Should we have this power?" Wendy asked.

"With great power comes great entertainment," Dipper had pointed out. And it was true, the memories they viewed had them hanging onto each other and shaking with violent laughter. It was a little cruel, like those Japanese TV shows where the host plays pranks on unsuspecting victims, sometimes sending them into catatonic shock. However, what was done had already been done, and it sometimes was fun to watch people's reaction to what amounted to no more than run-of-the-mill Gravity Falls creepiness.

That first Saturday evening they watched twenty-four more episodes. None of them were important—a sighting of the Multibear, someone who got dizzy in the woods because of spinning rapidly trying to catch sight of the Hide-Behind, a guy whose male cat had, um, an intense and short romance with a Jackalope on his front lawn, stuff like that. An hour and a bit of this was as much as they could take. They erased all twenty-five memory tubes—none of them had been remotely important or life-changing—and then Wendy suggested, "Let's see if we can locate some memories that belong to people we know, make it more interesting."

"Well—Robbie had a lot," Dipper said. They had studied his recollections the previous fall, when trying to find out what was causing Wendy to have disturbing dreams of snakes. "Now, those he might want to have back. What do you think?"

"Mmm, let's let that one lie for a while," Wendy said. "I mean, he and Tambry just got married, they're pretty happy, no sense in getting' him all disturbed. Though some of the stuff, like the convenience store, I wish he'd remember. Except of course he'd learn that he ran off screamin' when all that ghost crap broke out and he went and hid in the ladies' room!"

Wendy had first viewed all of Robbie's memories alone, but then she and Dipper had looked through all but one of them together. Dipper shrugged. "Yeah, Robbie missed it, but on the bright side, he doesn't have any memory of me doing the Lamby-Lamby Dance, 'cause he didn't see any of that. Strange how the ghosts turned everything in the store upside down, but in the ladies' room, Robby just crouched on the toilet with his hoodie pulled tight shut with the drawstring and didn't get dumped on the ceiling!"

"Probably the Duskertons didn't want to dump toilet water onto their ceilings," Wendy suggested.

"Good point, good point. Anyway, OK, right, put the Robbie memories in the maybe-restore pile."

Wendy mischievously began to hum the "Lamby Lamby" song, and Dipper said, "Forget it! Not gonna happen."

"Aw."

They found six tubes marked "Bud Gleeful." Dipper stacked them near the viewer. "We'll watch these first next time," Dipper said. "I recall Bud saying they'd used the gun on themselves a lot. I guess we can find out what drove Bud to become a member of the Society."

"Isn't this the woodpecker's husband?" Wendy asked, holding up a couple of tubes. "Just two of them. Maybe we can learn what makes a man develop a passion for a bird."

"This is enough familiar people to start with," Dipper said. "We can mingle in some of the people we don't know—"

"Uh-oh," Wendy said from the last third of the big, long pile of memory tubes. "Dipper?"

"What is it?"

"Um—don't know if you even want to watch this one, man. It has to be your call. This is the only one, I think." She put it in his hands.

And he turned it to read the name of the owner of the bad memory, inscribed on the tube with a Magic Marker:

 _Pacifica Northwest_.

 

* * *

**2: Down the Trail**

"We can't watch this," Dipper said, holding the memory tube. "It wouldn't be right. Pacifica—well, she's a private kind of person, you know."

"Yeah," Wendy agreed. "Whatever it is could be embarrassing or even criminal." She switched off the viewer, and they were left in the dark basement room with only one weak bulb, the one over the exit door, giving them any illumination.

Dipper looked at her shadowy face. "Criminal?"

"Abuse, man," Wendy said, carefully taking the tube from him. "Pacifica's told me about how her dad, like, conditioned her so that when he rang this little bell she had to obey him. I mean, she had no will of her own, just kinda went into a trance and had to do what she was told. It was like that dumb CD that Robbie gave me that one time. Brainwashing, Dipper."

"Oh, man, oh man," Dipper moaned. "We shouldn't watch this without her permission. But what if we let Pacifica see this, and it told her something about her family or herself that she just couldn't stand?"

"We have to think about this," Wendy said. She checked her phone. "We said we'd be out by eleven, Dip. One minute to go."

"Let's leave this until we can decide," Dipper said. He took the tube back and carefully placed it apart from the others, and then they picked up their popcorn bag and the soft-drink cans and left the secret room. Ripper greeted them up on the main floor, still wriggling his butt, and Dipper gave the Doberman the last chunk of steak.

They left through the storage room and the rear door of the Museum, stepping out into the darkness and pausing to discard their trash in the bin beside the back door. Something big flew over them, but it didn't seem to notice the two black-clad teens. "Ninjas!" Wendy whispered.

But a troubled Dipper didn't respond.

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Wednesday, nearly midnight, and I've just now gone to bed: Why is it that when I try to do something good for people I always mess up? Wendy and I thought that it would be best to get rid of those stored-up bad memories, or else, if it looked like something the victims of the Blind Eye Society could deal with, to let them see the images and recover their memories._

_But it gets a whole lot more complicated when you realize you're fooling around not only with people's memories, but with their lives. I mean, what are our lives but a collection of memories, good and bad?_

_Luckily, there's nothing in the pile of tubes with Wendy's name on it, or Grunkle Stan's, Mabel's, or mine. There was only one real brief stolen memory for Soos, and he took it like a big joke. I guess you could say he Soosed the whole thing._

_And now I'm starting to feel terrible because Wendy and I sat there and ate popcorn and laughed at what we saw, as if it was just a bad movie. I mean, a woman being chased around by animated underwear IS pretty goofy-looking, and the guy whose car got eaten by some kind of wood giant did have a hilarious panic attack. He sounded like somebody recorded at one speed and played back three times as fast._

_But you know what? They were real people, not actors. That lady really WAS scared, and the poor guy who lost his car also looked like he was losing his mind. These things that look funny now, especially to somebody who knows what Gravity Falls can be like, well, they were more than hurtful at the time to the people who experienced them._

_I hate to say it, but I'm starting to realize why Fiddleford created the memory-erasing gun._

_But Mabel says it's never good to try to repress bad memories. "Face 'em, file 'em, but don't forget 'em," she told me after our first visit to the lair of the Society._

_"Mabel," I asked her, "don't you have any regrets?"_

_"Nope!" she told me. "I regret nothing!"_

_Mabel. No matter what happens, she always tends to look on the bright side._

_Me. Not so much._

_Now we've got this whole thing with Pacifica. I've got to talk to Mabel about that. She's friends with Paz, more than I am, and if anybody knows Paz and can advise me on the best thing to do, it's Mabel._

* * *

Dipper didn't get to sleep until well after midnight, and Thursday morning, like clockwork, his phone beeped an early alarm, he got up, got into running shorts, shirt, and shoes, and, still half-asleep, went down to meet Wendy. They had exercises and stretches to do before their ritual morning run.

"It's—ugh—no fair! You—ugh!—you're wide awake!"

"Less yacking, more crunching!" Wendy ordered. She was kneeling on the grass, holding down Dipper's ankles, as he did modified sit-ups, twisting to touch his right knee with his left elbow, then on the next one reversing.

He finished the set and they traded places, Dipper kneeling and holding Wendy's ankles down. She didn't struggle at all and breezed through three reps.

"You can let go of my legs any time now, dude," she said with a grin.

Dipper had been lost in musing. He let go his grip on her ankles—she was wearing white socks, not her usual yellow-and-orange ones—and muttered, "Sorry."

They stood up and she said, "OK, let's stretch out and get started. Which way you want to run this morning?"

"Nature trail, I guess."

"Cool! Haven't done that in a while. Ready to stretch? OK, go!"

They started with ten lunges, followed those with hip flexors and side stretches, calf raises—when they'd first started running, these used to hurt like crazy, or at least hurt Dipper, but now that he was running track, they seemed easy. As for Wendy, she'd never had a problem with them.

Then stork stretches, standing on one leg and reaching behind to pull the other foot up until the heels touched their butts. And finally, they turned and faced each other. "Your favorite one, dude," Wendy said with a grin.

These were hip circles. Watching Wendy in her tank top and shorts, with her hands on her hips and her elbows bent, pivot and rotate her hips as if she were spinning a hula hoop, did make him smile.

She teased him: "You enjoy this so much! How about me? Turn around and do some so I can look at your butt, man!"

"What IS it with girls and butts?" Dipper asked. It was a question he'd asked before, and sometimes the answers he got made his face turn red. He did understand, sort of. He would have happily watched if Wendy had turned her back on him and started to gyrate her hips.

Didn't happen that morning, though. They started off loping down the Mystery Trail, past the pig pen, past the Bottomless Pit, past the Outhouse of Peril, and past the bonfire glade, and then they turned off onto a track they wore in the tall grasses every summer.

It was exhilarating on a cool, clear morning to run that way beneath a bright blue sky, through thickets of young pines, the clean scent sharp in their noses, and across meadows rioting with wildflowers. Dipper could recognize them all, a skill he had gained from the special telepathic bond he and Wendy shared when they touched. They always opened their special knowledge to each other, and Wendy knew every tree and every plant. Now he did, too.

He recognized the sun-yellow arnicas, the spiky-scarlet Indian paintbrushes, the pink Oregon checker-mallows, and all the rest. And in the rolling meadows, with the tall grass brushing as high as their knees, they always saw more than trees and flowers.

That morning they spooked a small group of jackrabbits, four or five of them, which went bounding along in front of them before realizing the humans were, apparently, in hot pursuit. Then they veered off the trail and vanished in the rustling grass. A moment later a Gnome burst out, running after the rabbits and yelling, "Come back, Judy! I love you!"

"Gnome furries, man!" Wendy said.

They were running at just the right speed, which meant they could talk, but it was a little difficult, and Dipper had broken into a sweat. They gave Moon Trap Pond a wide berth—they'd sort of promised the owner they wouldn't fool with it—and then rounded the standing stone, which Dipper still wanted to investigate one of these days. Then they were heading back the way they'd come.

Wendy had measured the route with a pedometer, and they knew they had run for four miles when they came to the place they called Possum Tree, a gnarly California black oak. Once they had glimpsed three sleek opossums hanging upside-down from a limb by their pink prehensile tails, like bizarre furry fruit. Only later did Dipper learn that possums don't do that—anywhere else but in Gravity Falls Valley, at any rate.

Inside the valley, all bets were off. Here possums could do almost anything but talk, and who knew about that? Some animals won't talk to anyone but their own species. Dipper was almost certain he'd once spotted an opossum taking a pocket watch out of her pouch and checking the time. And once he and Mabel had trapped in an attic closet an animal that intruded in their bedroom. Mabel had bet him five dollars that it was a possum.

It turned out to be not-a-possum, but they never did manage to identify it, and, come to think of it, Mabel still owed him five dollars.

Wendy and Dipper started walking at the Possum Tree to cool down, holding hands. Instantly Dipper caught Wendy's thought:  _You're really worried about Pacifica huh?_

— _Yeah. It's a lot of responsibility, and we don't know what's in that memory. What if it's something that will really bother her?_

_Gotcha, man. She's been through some rough times, don't want to upset her. OK, what about this? She's supposed to come over for a sleepover on Friday—_

— _Oh, great. That means I'm gonna be chased out of my bedroom! Guess I'd better hide anything I don't want Grenda to bust._

_Yeah, that girl loves to break things. But I was sayin', that's our movie night anyway, so what if I fix it with Dad so I can sleep over, too? Maybe get a few minutes alone with Pacifica. I can sort of sound her out about maybe wanting to see—or not see—her old memory._

— _OK, but be careful. I get the feeling she's really down this summer for some reason. The one time I saw her, she just didn't want to talk about anything._

_Probably guy trouble. You boys are such a pain, I don't know why we girls even put up with you._

They had reached the bonfire glade. Aloud, Dipper said, "We've got a few minutes before we have to shower and have breakfast and get ready for work. Why don't we sit here, and I'll explain to you why you girls put up with us guys?"

"Oh, smooth, Dip!" Wendy said, chuckling. "Yeah, let's rest a little bit."

They sat on the log, their arms around each other. And kissed.

"Hey," Wendy said, rubbing his chest, "you gotta hide stuff before the sleepover? What do you have in your room that I don't know about, man?"

"Oh, my porn stash, my bong—"

She pushed him off the log, laughing. "You dork!"

He climbed back up, grinning. "Yeah, I know." He paused and then confessed, "Actually, I used to have a collection of pictures of you. To look at when you're here and I'm in California and I miss you so bad it hurts."

"Used to? What happened to them?"

"Mabel found them. I had them hidden in a drawer, but you can't hide stuff from my sister." He shrugged. "I think she thought I'd look at them and, uh, you know."

"Um—did your collection include that bikini photo?"

He took her hand and opened his mind to her, so she'd be absolutely sure he was telling the truth. — _I got rid of that. Much as I loved looking at it, I knew it embarrassed you, and I got rid of it._

_Tambry thought it was so funny, sending it to you. But she apologized. Wonder how she and Robbie are makin' out down there in California._

— _You haven't heard from her?_

_Not since they first got there. I guess even Tambry can't do constant status updates when she's on her honeymoon. But I know she and Robbie were working on some songs they want to record, if the producer guy likes them._

— _Hey, Wendy, what do you think of Teek's wearing Robbie's old hoodie?_

_Surprised me when I saw it, but it doesn't bother me. I can sense it bothers you._

— _Well, Teek doesn't LOOK like Robbie, and he's no musician, but, you know—I guess from that summer when I was twelve, Robbie really got to me. He was always so surly and just pointlessly mean._

_Yeah, dude sort of took teen rebellion too seriously. I mean, he WORKED at it!_

— _But—I don't know. From the second I first saw Teek in that hoodie, it's like my paranormal sense started tingling, and I don't know why._

_Cursed hoodie?_

Dipper had to laugh at that. Aloud, he said, "No, I don't think that's it. But I just don't know. It's not a strong enough premonition for me to bother Grunkle Ford about it. Anyway, he's working on something secret himself. He told me he thinks there may be some threat forming, but he won't talk about it until he knows more."

"Gravity Falls," Wendy said. "Well, we better head in."

"Just one more," Dipper said, leaning in. He kissed her, then traced her jaw and throat with his lips. "Mm, salty girl," he murmured. "I like the taste!"

"Just sweat, dude," she said. "Let me try." She kissed his chin, then licked his neck. "Is kinda tasty, though. OK, let's go. Oh, Dip, I didn't cause that, did I?"

"It's all right," he told her, standing up with some awkwardness. "It'll go away. I'll walk it off."

* * *

 ******3: In the Attic**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Friday, 8:00 PM—"Sure it's gonna be OK with you if I do this?" Wendy asked me._

" _Yeah," I told her. "We really need to explain to Pacifica about the Society of the Blind Eye and how they used to take people's memories. I don't think I could do it. You tell her and then we'll let her know that there's a tube with her name on it in the lair. See how she feels. Maybe we could take her there tonight, or tomorrow night, or something, if she wants to go. We could set up the viewer and just step out and let her watch it alone, or if she'd rather, I guess one of us could stay with her."_

" _I don't know that I want to," Wendy said. "Memories are super private. I mean, you and me don't even share every single memory when we do our telepathy thing."_

" _I know. But—well, maybe that's a decision only Paz could make. Anyway, talk to her and see how she feels."_

" _Not my favorite assignment, Dip. But, yeah, somebody's got to do it. I'm gonna be draggin' in the morning, but I guess I'm going to a sleepover."_

_The others were already in the Shack. Pacifica had shown up right after dinner, and Grenda and Candy had already clomped upstairs and into my room. While Wendy and I had been talking, I could hear giggles and shrieks. "Do me a favor?" I asked. "If Paz doesn't want to go tonight, just stay with them and try to take the volume down a few notches? Mabel's room is right under the attic, and her sleepovers keep me awake."_

" _I'll try, can't promise anything." Wendy squeezed my hand and left me on the sofa, watching a movie called_ The Ghost Who Wanted to Dance.  _It was about a ghost. Who wanted to be a tap-dancer. I mean, some of these movies, the title just says it all._

* * *

"Hi, gang," Wendy said, coming into the attic room that Dipper and Mabel had shared during their first summer in Gravity falls. "Whoa!"

She dodged a barrage of Nyarf darts.

"Told ya you'd never hit her!" Mabel crowed. "She's got reflexes like a cat! Like a  _cat_!"

Grenda spun her two Nyarf pistols like an old-movie gunslinger. "Worth a try!"

Candy smiled apologetically. "We experimented to test sharpness of human reaction. You passed."

Pacifica, sitting on the floor with her back against the foot of Dipper's bed, didn't have a Nyarf pistol and hadn't participated. She didn't even look up. She was all in soft pink.

"Pretty PJ's, Paz," Wendy said, dropping her workout bag on the floor beside the door.

Pacifica shrugged.

"She's sad," Mabel confided in a stage whisper.

"Shut up," Pacifica said, but without her trademark sass.

"Everybody gets moody now and again," Wendy said. "I'm gonna change to my PJs." She stripped down to her underwear and then donned fuzzy green pajama bottoms and a pullover light-green top. She had to haul her long red hair out of the neck. "Now I'm comfortable," she said, though she reached inside the shirt to remove her bra. "So, what's up, girls?"

Candy said, "I have a problem to discuss. I have dated a boy for a month now, but it is not working out so good. How do you break up with a boy, Wendy?"

Wendy pulled Dipper's pillow off the bed, tossed it onto the floor, and sat on it next to Pacifica. "Oh, man, there are so many ways! I caught one of my boyfriends just flat lying to me and told him off. Just walked off and left him sitting in his car. There was another guy who didn't want to do anything but dump on me—just wanted a girlfriend to complain to about everything. Just stopped answering the phone when he called, put him on ignore. Why do you want to break up, Candy?"

"He does not kiss me so well and will not learn," Candy said, making a face.

Grenda shoved her friend so hard that Candy fell over on her back. "Oh! Oh! T.M.I.!"

Adjusting her glasses as she sat up again, Candy said, "But you tell us that Marius sticks his tongue to your back molars when he kisses you. Is that not T.M.I. too?

"No! It's J.T.R.I. Just the right I!" Grenda proclaimed. She started to drum on the floor with her fists. "Just right! Just right! Just right!"

"The first time that Teek and I kissed open-mouthed," Mabel confided, "I lost my gum!"

"Wild thing!" Grenda yelled, hurling a cushion at Mabel. It missed, but broke the triangle window and sailed off into the night. An owl fluttered down to the sill of the broken-out window, stared in at them, shook its head, and flew off again.

Through it all, Pacifica just brooded. She didn't get more talkative as the evening went on with gossip, experimentation with make-up, and craziness erupting. Then, close to midnight, the blonde teen went out to the bathroom. Wendy followed her. When she emerged, Wendy said quietly, "Hey, take a minute. Let's sit over here, Paz. Want to talk to you."

They sat on the padded window seat in front of the Bill Cipher window—as Wendy always thought of it, anyway, the window with the big triangle design. "You're really down. What's wrong, girl?" Wendy asked softly.

"Everything."

"Tell me. Maybe I can help."

"You can't."

"Boy trouble?"

Pacifica bit her lip and at first just shook her head, but then it all began to come out: Her fear of changing schools again, her break-up with Adam Beedle, and—reluctantly—the tale of how she had tried an online chat site and had been cut off by a guy after sending him a picture.

"Um—not a sexy picture, was it?" Wendy asked gently.

"I was wearing a sweater. It wasn't, like, a nudie photo or anything," Pacifica said. "But I was trying to look, you know, attractive."

"Forget it," Wendy said. "If the boy didn't respond, it doesn't mean anything. Maybe he thought you were out of his league, you know?"

Pacifica blinked, as if she hadn't thought of that. Grudgingly, she muttered, "He could have said."

"Yeah, guys are the worst sometimes," Wendy agreed. "Hey, it'll work out. Didn't Adam graduate this year?"

"Next year. He's older than I am."

"That's right, he's in my class," Wendy said. She grinned. "Well, after I screwed up and flunked two courses and got behind, he's in my class now. Don't see much of him, though. We don't have any classes together. Want me to talk to him?"

"What would you even say?" Pacifica asked, drawing up her knees and hugging them. "I don't know. It's so confusing right now. Dad wants to put me back in private school. I don't really want to go, but I don't want to stay in Gravity Falls High, either. I've got, like, zero friends."

"That's not true," Wendy said. "Candy and Grenda, for example. And a lot of guys like you, but, you know—"

"Hate my family," Pacifica finished for her.

"I was going to say, they're kind of intimidated by you. You're the most beautiful girl in town, Pacifica. That scares some guys away."

"It's hard to stand up to Dad," Pacifica mumbled, not visibly cheered by Wendy's compliment. "He's trying to be better. He really is. But he's making money again, and he's starting to say we have a position in society, I have to live up to our reputation—as if we had one! Mom will go along with whatever Dad wants. It's just so hard for me, and he doesn't understand."

She fell silent, and Wendy reached out and rubbed her back. "There's one other thing," Wendy told her. "Not sure if you're ready to hear this."

Pacifica looked at her through tears. "It can't get any worse," she said.

* * *

Wendy tapped on the door of Mabel's room—where Dipper was spending the night—and he opened it. "Oh," he said. "Hi. Uh—come in."

He sat on the bed. Pacifica sat next to him, and Wendy drew up a chair. "I told her, Dip," Wendy said. "You explain."

"Starting where?"

"The memory gun."

"OK," Dipper said. "Fiddleford invented it thirty-some years ago. It, I don't know, absorbs memories from your brain and stores them in a glass tube. You forget all about the memory, even forget that it was removed. But it's like—this is hard, I don't know the science—it's like there's still a phantom trace of the memory in your mind. If you see what it was, it comes back to you."

"Stan's an example," Wendy added. "He, like, forgot everything! That was how he got rid of Bill Cipher."

"I remember he had amnesia after everything else went back to normal," Pacifia said. "I never knew why."

Dipper nodded. "Yeah, in that case, Mabel got him back by showing him pictures and things. It's funny—he still has blank spots, he says. He remembers everything about being a kid up to when he got kicked out of home."

"Wait, your great-uncle got kicked out?" Pacifica asked.

"At the end of his junior year in high school," Dipper said. "He never graduated. Anyway, we know from things he told us that he spent a lot of time being, I guess, a traveling salesman. He knows that much and can recall bits and pieces now, but he can't remember many details. And then he came to Gravity Falls, and met Grunkle Ford again, and he can remember when Grunkle Ford went away, after that he recalls running the Shack as Mr. Mystery, and he knows the people in town, because once he'd started to recover, just seeing somebody would bring back memories about them." He sighed. "The important thing is, you can recover those memories. Just a little jog will bring them back sometimes."

"OK," Wendy said. "Here's what I didn't tell you. For years and years, there were these dudes who ran what they called the Society of the Blind Eye . . . ."

She described, and Dipper confirmed, the activities of the Society. "The weird thing is," Wendy finished, "those guys thought they were doin' people good. But Doc McGucket agreed that the whole deal was a big mistake. A person's got to come to terms with their memories, not erase them."

Pacifica frowned. "So—these people—stole my memory?"

"One or two of your memories, probably," Dipper said. "We don't know. It would have been something before the summer of 2012, because that's when we broke up the Society."

"Do you have any blank spots?" Wendy asked.

Pacifica said, "I . . . don't know!"

"That's the trouble," Dipper said. "If a memory's taken, you're never even aware of it. Anyway, we can show you what's in the tube. You'll get those memories back. But only if you want to."

"What if it's something I don't like?" Pacifica asked.

Dipper put his hand on her arm. "It's usually not anything real bad. A lot of the time, it's people who accidentally saw the Society members out on the streets at night."

"They kinda stood out," Wendy said. "They wore these bright red hooded robes. They weren't exactly ninjas!"

Dipper flinched at that word, but Pacifica didn't seem to notice. He said, "There's no telling, though. The majority of the memories were of the kind of strange things that only happen in Gravity Falls. Fiddleford once had a run-in with the Gnomes and erased his own memory of them, because little men in red caps were disturbing to think about. Another guy saw some kind of forest giant, like the Ents, and—"

"Like what?" Pacifica asked.

"The Ents. Treebeard?"

She looked at him as if he'd gone crazy.

Dipper said, "You . . . never read  _Lord of the Rings_  or saw the movies?"

"I don't like fantasy movies," Pacifica said. "Just romances and musicals."

"The Ents were like, tree dudes," Wendy said. "Giants as big as trees, and they looked like trees, too. The guy Dipper was talking about saw a giant wood-like creature walking around Gravity Falls, and the Society made him forget about it."

"Anyway," Dipper said, "if you really want to see the memory, we can show it—or them, if there's more than one—to you."

"I guess I want to see it," Pacifica said. "But not alone."

"We can watch with you," Wendy said gently. "But remember, Paz, memories are as personal as it gets. If you start to feel embarrassed, we'll shut the machine off."

"Want to go tonight?" Dipper asked.

Pacifica shook her head. "I'm afraid to. Let me get my nerve up."

"The History Museum closes tomorrow at six," Wendy said. "Same as the Shack. I could swing by and pick you up and we could check out the memory then. 'Course, we'll have to sneak in, so we'll wait until dark."

"Are you OK with that?" Dipper asked.

"I—yes, I guess so," Pacifica said. "It can't make me feel any worse than I do right now."

Overhead, a riot of raucous laughter broke out over some remark one of the girls had made. They could hear Grenda's distinctive bellow: "Hey, where's Pacifica and Wendy? They got to get in on this! In on this! In on this!"

"We'd better get back up there," Wendy said.

Pacifica nodded. "Yeah. They've probably decided you and I are off making hot love together."

"Or with Dipper," Wendy said mischievously.

For the first time that evening, Pacifica laughed. "Look at his face! It's glowing!"

And then, to his relief, they left him and went back up to the attic.

Where the noise got twice as loud.

* * *

**4: Under the Museum**

That evening they slipped into the back door of the History Museum as twilight shaded into night. Dipper placated the guard dog with more treats—they'd bought a bag of chicken jerky dog treats on the way in—and the contented Doberman padded along with them until they went into the eyeball room, which the dog didn't seem to like. They heard his claws clicking as he retreated down the hall.

Dipper pressed the disguised switch, the fireplace opened—Pacifica said, "Ew! Why does it have to be so  _creepy_?"—and they went down to the sub-basement rooms and to the memory-storage vault.

Dipper explained how everything worked and showed Pacifica one of the memory erasers. "They'd put you in a chair out in the first room," he told her, "and dial into the gun whatever it was they thought you should forget. Then you'd get zapped right in the face, and that made you forget."

"Dip," Wendy said, "start with one of the others, show her how it works. How about Lazy Susan, the one we saw just before we busted up the Society? That memory wasn't so bad."

Dipper glanced at Pacifica. She had dressed down for the occasion—not as a ninja, but she was wearing dark jeans, a dark-purple top, and a purple scarf tied over her hair. "All right, but Pacifica? This is private, okay? We haven't tried to restore Lazy Susan's memories yet. We don't always do it. If somebody seems to be, you know, functioning normally with the memory loss, or if it seems kind of trivial, we leave well enough alone. If it's more serious, we get in touch and give the memories back if the people want them. But no matter what, we don't talk about what we see."

"As if I'd want to," Pacifica said. "Look, I'm not a big fan of Greasy's Diner? But Susan's always been nice to me. I wouldn't gossip about her. Or her memories."

"Then just watch, and you'll see how it happens," Wendy told her.

Dipper found the cylinder with "Susan Wentworth" and the year 2012 written on it, clicked it into the machine, and started it up. "It's old-fashioned," he said about the viewer. "It has to warm up for a few seconds before you get picture and sound."

* * *

The video began without introduction or explanation. Blind Ivan, his face mostly concealed by his red hood, intoned, "Who is the subject of our meeting?"

More red-robed figures led in Susan Wentworth, her head concealed in a pouch with no eye holes. "This woman," they said in dismal unison.

As they removed the blindfold hood and pushed Susan, still dressed in her pink waitress uniform and white apron, into what looked like an antique dentist's chair and strapped her arms down, Pacifica whispered, "Oh, my God! Who are they?"

"Society of the Blind Eye," Wendy told her. "People from town. 'Cept I never met the leader, Blind Ivan, and never heard of him. Watch."

In his deep, British-accented voice, Blind Ivan asked, "What is it you have seen?"

Susan, looking apprehensive, said, "Uh, well, I was leaving the diner, and I saw these little bearded doodads, and I was like,  _Whaaa_?"

As the members of the Society pulled the drawstrings on their hoods, as though to shield their eyes, Ivan took a device from a trunk and comforted Susan: "There, there. You won't be like  _whaaa_  for much longer."

He pointed the memory eraser. Susan asked if it were a hair dryer, if the Society people were barbers, and then a brilliant, shimmering ray hit her full in the face—

The screen jittered and they saw her memory in desaturated color: She locked up the diner, headed for her home, and passed—four Gnomes. One, directing the others, Dipper recognized as Jeff; the other three, standing totem-poled, were intent on stealing a pie from the windowsill.

They faintly heard a scratchy soundtrack: Susan said, "Good night, tiny men stealing my pie—wait, _what_?"

Jeff was saying something that only partly came through: "Lift with your knees . . . resort to cannibalism . . . ma'am."

They saw Susan panic, run to a pay phone, and dial 6-1-1.

The memory ended, and a dazed Susan sat limp in the chair.

"Lazy Susan," Ivan said, "what do you remember of little bearded men?"

Robotically, Susan said, "My mind is clear . . .." and the picture and sound ended.

* * *

"Gnomes?" Pacifica asked. "She was freaked out by  _Gnomes_? Why? You see them all the time!"

"Now you do," Dipper said. "Back then, they hid from humans. Remember, this was the summer of 2012."

Pacifica frowned. "So, Lazy Susan just forgot about seeing them?"

"Yep," Wendy said. "Totally forgot it. Just like the other people the Society helped."

"Well," Dipper added, "by their definition of helping. We know now that if it's used too often, the memory eraser has terrible side effects. I don't think you got any, because evidently, they had you in that chair just once, as far as we can tell. We've looked through all the tubes, and this one is the only one tagged with your name."

"They didn't get everybody in town," Wendy said. "Didn't seem to get me or any of my family, or Stan, or Dipper and Mabel. Others they got over and over again."

"Yeah, well, they never got us because we'd only been in town for a couple of months when all of this broke," Dipper said. "And anyway, I wasn't bothered by stuff I saw, just intrigued. And Mabel thought it was all lots of fun, so she wasn't scared. But we've found tubes for Soos, lots of them for—well, people you know. None for your dad or mom, though. Just you."

"Want to see it?" Wendy asked gently.

Pacifica bit her bottom lip and nodded. "But hold my hand," she whispered.

Dipper removed Susan's memory tube and replaced it with Pacifica's. Wendy held her left hand, Dipper took her right—and started the playback.

* * *

"Let me  _go!_ " Pacifica, maybe a year or two younger than she had been when Dipper first met her, struggled in the grip of one of the bigger Society members. The others forced her into the chair and strapped her arms. "Father! Make them stop!"

Dipper blinked. There was Preston Northwest, not in a robe but in his usual business suit. "There, there, daughter," he said coldly. "This won't hurt a bit."

Pacifica thrashed in the chair. "Let me go!"

"What is it that she has seen?" Ivan asked Preston.

"A little business deal." Preston whispered into Ivan's ear, and Ivan typed something into the eraser.

"Just relax, Miss Northwest," he said. "This will only take a moment."

The flash of the memory gun, and then, in washed-out color and sound, the memory—

* * *

Pacifica, opening a door. Preston Northwest standing inside in front of a chart on an easel, saying, "Very well. I will discover the people you are looking for and give you their names. In return, you will grant me exclusive rights to shares in your enterprise."

A high-pitched voice said, "It's a deal!"

A stick-figure hand shook Preston's, blue flames erupting around the handclasp.

Pacifica pushed the door all the way open and saw a floating triangle, yellow, the only splash of color in the monochrome room. It had one eye, which moved toward her. "Uh-oh! We have company!" the high-pitched voice sang out, sounding amused.

An angry Preston looked directly at the camera—into his daughter's eyes. "Pacifica!"

The memory ended.

* * *

"Bill Cipher," Dipper said. "Your dad made a deal with him."

Pacifica was shaking. "That thing messed up my dad! Messed up his face! We thought he was going to  _die_ before it came past again and Mom yelled at it, and it said, 'Sheesh, can't you take a joke?' and turned him back! Then it snapped its fingers and these monsters came and took my parents and almost got me! And Dad made a deal with that horrible thing?"

"What was the deal?" Wendy asked.

"I think I can guess," Dipper told him. "The thing on the easel was the Zodiac. Bill was probably trying to identify the people represented on it. They were the only threat that he knew about."

"I—remember now," Pacifica said slowly. "I think that was—it was in the summer of 2011. Before you and Mabel even came to town. I thought it was a ghost or something."

"Worse than a ghost, Paz," Wendy said.

"An interdimensional demon," Dipper told her. "A crazy one, at that."

"My rotten dad sold out the town," Pacifica said miserably. She blinked. "Let me see it again. Can you freeze the picture?"

"Sure."

Dipper re-ran it until Pacifica said, "Stop now!"

The image still twitched and flickered, and the picture was grainy, but you could see Preston's outstretched hand, Cipher's about to grasp it, and the whole chart in the background. "There's the llama," Pacifica groaned. "My dad didn't just sell out the town—he sold me out, too!"

"Hold on," Wendy said. "He didn't know that."

"Yeah, he couldn't, because you  _weren't_  the llama then," Dipper told her. "I don't think you became the llama until you put on the sweater that night before we counter-attacked Bill. And I wasn't the pine tree then, because I didn't have my cap, and Mabel wasn't the shooting star—she didn't even knit that sweater until like two months before we even heard our parents were sending us to Gravity Falls."

"But—the llama symbol is on the chart," Pacifica said. "Right there."

"So are ice, the pine tree, the shooting star," Dipper pointed out. "The six-fingered hand—Bill would have known that one already. Grunkle Ford. But I don't think he could clearly see our world—what we saw in the memory happened in the Mindscape. Your dad wasn't really awake—he was in a trance or something—but when somebody confronts Bill in the Mindscape, other people can see or hear what's going on if they're nearby and focus on the person who's in the trance."

"Mabel and Soos did that time when Gideon made a deal with Cipher," Wendy said. "She told me."

"Anyway," Dipper said, "you walked into the Mindscape and saw what was happening. Bill, looking from the Mindscape into the real world, couldn't see as clearly—at least I don't think he could. OK, he knew the six-fingered hand was Ford, and maybe that the question mark was Soos, but it's pretty clear that he didn't yet know that, oh, Wendy was the ice and Robbie was the broken heart and so on. That's why he made the deal with your dad, so he'd have an agent in our dimension who could help him identify the people represented on the Zodiac."

"And that's how he recognized us all," Wendy said. "How he got prepared for us trying to band together and stop him during Weirdmageddon."

"I ought to just run away from home!" Pacifica was weeping, though not sobbing. "My dad's such a  _shit_!"

"Hey, hey, it's all over now," Wendy said, hugging her. "And it didn't hurt anything, girl. The Zodiac didn't work, anyhow."

"Yeah, because of Grunkle Stan," Dipper reminded Pacifica.

"You remember when we got, like, turned into banners?" Wendy asked Pacifica.

Pacifica nodded. "That was horrible. I couldn't move, couldn't blink, couldn't even breathe! But I knew what was happening!"

"Yeah, me too," Wendy said. "Look, my point is, if you can deal with  _that_  memory, this one's nothing. Anyhow, Mr. Northwest isn't the same as he was. He's changed. And you can change, too. Don't let the past hold onto you. Decide to do what's right for you."

"And do it," Dipper said. "No matter what."

Pacifica pulled away from Wendy and took the memory tube out of the machine. She held it for a moment, then threw it against the stone wall, as hard as she could. It shattered. "Know what?" Pacifica asked in a savage tone. "I'm  _not_ changing schools! I don't  _care_  what Dad says! If he puts up an argument, I'm going to tell him I know what he did to me—how he stole my memory! And how he made a deal to turn the town over to that demon freak! And if he pushes me to do things I don't want to do—I'll tell Mom! I'll tell  _everybody_!"

"Be your own girl," Wendy said. "Stand up for yourself."

Pacifica looked at Dipper. He shrugged. "Nobody can tell you what's right," he said. "You have to feel it inside."

Pacifica wiped her eyes and then timidly asked, "Wendy, can I kiss your boyfriend?"

"This one time I'll say yes," Wendy replied with a grin. "Knock yourself out."

* * *

"Three of them are very strong right now," the researcher murmured. The room lay in darkness, except for the ghostly glow coming from a crystal ball. He held a pendulum over a chart, and the weight at the end vibrated. "The Ice. The Tree. And—it is not a sheep, as I once believed. I know now that I didn't make a mistake when I saw the image on the computer. It's a llama! They are together, and their life forces are very strong. They . . . reinforce each other."

He had been bent over the chart—a map of Gravity Falls, in fact, the four-color, not-to-scale tourist map he had picked up at a place called the Mystery Shack. Just a nondescript figure in an anonymous crowd of gawkers, he had passed through with no one's becoming the wiser. He had picked up the cartoony sketch map of the town and its sights and had brought it back to his lair.

The three Zodiac symbols seemed to have gathered in . . . a museum of history, according to the map.

He could kill them all, all three. He could do it now, send a deadly spell, though it would cost him blood.

But . . . he couldn't. Because if one, or two, or even three were killed, others would immediately spring up to take their places.

No.

"The key is not to kill, but to corrupt them," he murmured. "Perhaps not these three. Perhaps all of them, or only one or two. But to find and isolate at least three members—and I still don't know for certain the identities of three of them—the three weakest, most vulnerable—to turn them to evil and to my service—that is what I must do. That is what must happen."

The shadowy figure in the room with him said quietly, "I understand."

* * *

**5: In the Clearing**

**From the Journals of Dipper Pines:**   _Monday. Right after our run, before I even showered, I asked Wendy to cover for me, and she said it wouldn't be a problem. I didn't tell her what I was about to do, but she probably had a good sense of it. Anyway, she didn't try to talk me out of it._

_We had run through town and back, and I just kept going past the Shack, down the Mystery Trail and past the bonfire glade. At first, I missed the track to where I was going—the undergrowth has shot up a lot since last summer. But then I saw the Talking Rock—it's a rock with supposedly prehistoric Native American pictographs carved on it, except Grunkle Stan once admitted he had etched the carvings into the rock with an electric engraver and, as he said, "a buttload of batteries."_

_He had randomly chosen the symbols. They ran: Square; upside-down V; three dots; X; upside-down A; backward, angular P; upside-down V. Then a second line: Circle with dot in center; straight line; X; arrowhead pointing left; upside-down V; small triangle; circle with dot._

_According to Stan, it said in an ancient pre-Columbian Native American language "Place of Mystery."_

_However, I knew Grunkle Stan, and long ago I worked out that it really said, "WELCOME SUCKERS."_

_Anyway, when I saw the Talking Rock off the Mystery Trail to the right, I knew I had missed the harder-to-see path. I backtracked slowly and finally found it. Then it wasn't too far in the woods to the Bill Cipher effigy._

_It was starting to look soft with a coat of moss. I brushed some fallen twigs off its hat and cleared some leaves from the fingers of the outstretched hand. The fallen wooden beam, once part of the Fearamid, was where I usually sat, but now it sprouted brown toadstools and was green with lichen. I just sat on the ground instead, on a pile of fallen leaves, damp but not soaking wet._

_I settled down, closed my eyes, started to breathe deeply, and slipped into the Mindscape._

_It is very weird there. I mean, you have a kind of body, or at least think you do, but if something ordinarily fatal happens—like if you get a big hole blasted all the way through your chest, let's say—you don't feel any pain from it and, if you don't believe you're damaged, you really aren't. You can cope with something like that. In fact, you can even fill it in and make it heal just by thinking and visualizing._

_But aside from that, it's obvious you have left reality behind._

_For one thing, you're in a black-and-white world. Except for yourself, or people you know, and, if you spot him, Bill Cipher. People are usually in color, unless they're strangers, and then they tend to be blurry and almost impossible to see clearly or describe._

_Same with inanimate objects. All the backgrounds and landscapes and buildings are in shades of gray. And they're wacked-out. You might see a swing hanging from two chains that are just stuck in the air, not attached to anything. But if you sit in it, you can swing. Or maybe you stay still and the whole world rocks back and forth under you. I mean, it's insane._

_And in this insane place, I was looking for a notoriously insane character. In fact, he's been known to brag about it. I was looking for Bill Cipher. Up until last summer, I've always managed to contact him here._

_This time, though—I looked around the shades-of-gray world. No Bill, no yellow triangle, just the stone statue (not mossy in the Mindscape, but clean and almost polished). I tried calling him—meaning I thought about yelling his name. I don't think I produced a sound in the real world, but in the Mindscape, I made the ground shake with the volume I gave it. Think it there, and it happens._

_The Mindscape doesn't have echoes, though. The sound fell away to silence. Nothing._

_I wasn't sure what was going on. Once I could reliably find him here. True, last fall Bill had manifested away from the glade. In one case, thousands of miles away. Somehow or other, he was gaining the ability to fake physical human form—he appeared to Stan and Ford way off in Florida, and once to Wendy outside her house._

_Now—he seemed to have left our dimension._

_But I needed his advice!_

_It looked like I wouldn't get it. I started to bring myself out of the Mindscape, but then, before forcing myself to wake up, I'd try one last time. I thought—not even speaking in the Mindscape—"Bill, you left a little of yourself in my heart. If we've got a connection, let me be where you are."_

_For a moment I thought I'd died. I mean, everything went out, like blowing out a candle inside a mausoleum at midnight when there's no moon. Everything was black. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face._

_If I had a hand._

_If I had a face._

_But then I heard a familiar, though thin, voice: "Pine Tree! You caught me in an awkward position."_

" _Where are you?"_

" _Where you can't go. But you can sense how it is. Comfortable, isn't it?"_

_Now that he said it—yeah, it was warm, and I felt light and floaty. But everything was absolutely dark. "Why can't I see?"_

" _Not much to see yet. Don't worry your great big head, kid. By the way, how's my favorite lumberjack gal?"_

" _Leave Wendy out of this!"_

" _Sheesh, jealous, are we, hmmm? Hey, Pine Tree, did she get rid of those sneaky snakey slithery ssssserpentsssss?"_

" _We got rid of them together. And that CD cover that called them."_

" _You're welcome."_

" _I wasn't going to thank you!"_

" _It was preemptive thanks. See, Pine Tree? I'm getting to be politer than you!"_

" _Listen, Bill, somebody's killing people. Ford thinks it may be someone who somehow is connected with the Zodiac."_

" _Again, with the Zodiac! I wish I'd never created it. It turns out to be one big pain in the acute angle!"_

" _I need your help, Bill. Someone's messing with Pacifica—"_

" _Llama llady?" he said. I don't know how he got two l's in "lady," but I heard both._

" _Yeah, that's her. That's what worries me, because I think somebody may have learned that the llama on the wheel is Pacifica."_

" _Blondie. Still think you missed a sitting duck with that one, kid! But Ice is cooler, I suppose. Hmm. Zodiac and there's a killer loose. Sounds familiar. Oh, yeah. Kid, I'll be dishonest with you. I'll help you."_

" _OK, do it."_

" _You got wax in your ears? I said DIS-honest. Honestly, I can't help you. I'm sort of occupying at the moment."_

" _You mean 'occupied.'"_

" _Pine Tree, I don't think what you mean I do."_

_I groaned. "Not even any advice?"_

_For a few seconds, or maybe a week—time's funny in the Mindscape, and I don't mean it makes you laugh—I thought he wasn't going to answer. But then he did:_

" _Ten of you, most old, some new. Each is right, each is wrong. Each is weak, each is strong. One won't do, or three or two—the power of ten is a slim chance to win."_

" _What are you, a poet now?" I asked._

" _I got a lot of time on my hands, kid. And just this chat is taking a lot of energy. Best I can do. Old Axolotl's got me, kinda tied up with rules. But chin up! We'll meet again."_

_He started humming the tune, and that made me vibrate, and then somebody was shaking me, and—_

* * *

"Dipper, wake up!"

He came to, seeing the woods spin around him as if he were riding on a carousel. "Mabel?"

"You dork!" She punched his shoulder. "We've been hunting you for _hours_! Why'd you just disappear?"

Dipper stood up, last year's crisp dry leaves cascading off him, his legs as noodly as they had been after Rumble McSkirmish had pounded on him. The light looked wrong. "What time is it?"

"Four o'clock! You didn't come and you didn't come, and Wendy was starting to get real worried! You didn't answer your phone—"

"I don't  _have_  my phone," he said. "No pockets in these shorts. I don't have any way to carry it when we're running."

"I'm gonna get you one of those armbands, then!" Mabel said. "Why'd you come out here, anyhow?"

He said, "I wanted to talk to—huh!"

Because he wasn't in the clearing around the stone effigy at all. He had been lying on, or from the feel of his clothes, in a pile of leaves under the eaves of the forest, across from the Talking Rock. His tee shirt was full of leaves, as were the legs of his running shorts. "What, was I buried?"

"Under the leaves! Except for your head, and that blended in," Mabel said. "Soos didn't spot you when he took the tram down the trail—"

"Everybody would be looking at the rock," Dipper said. "On the right side of the trail, not the left."

"Yeah, well, I spotted your pine-tree hat and found you down in the leaves. What were you doing, hibernating?"

Dipper shook his shirt. He thought he had a good idea of who had stuffed the scratchy dead leaves inside his clothes.  _Oh, very funny, Bill._

Mabel had taken out her phone and had dialed. She said, "I found him, Wendy! Yeah, he's all right, except he's a great big poop-head! We're not far from the Shack. See you in a few."

She turned off her phone and glared at Dipper. "Wendy is gonna be so mad at you! Come on!"

She walked about ten steps, then seemed to realize he wasn't with her. She turned around and yelled, "Dipper! What?"

"Let me borrow your phone," he said. He called Wendy. "Hi, this is Dipper."

"Dude! You had us all so worried!"

"Yeah, well, I was trying to get in touch with Bill Cipher, and somehow I spent a lot more time at it than I'd thought. Listen, you have a pen and paper handy?"

"Just a sec. OK, pen, pen—here's a pencil."

"That'll do," Dipper said. "These are symbols, not letters. Draw what I describe, as best you can. I'll see if I can decipher them when we get back."

He seemed to hear an echo in his mind: "Heh. Decipher. You almost had a joke there, Pine Tree!"

Dipper, frowning at the new, fresh symbols—larger than the ones Stan had made—carved into the Talking Rock said, "OK, first line: Circle with a dot in the middle. Two vertical lines. Triangle. One dot. Lower-case b. Uh—a pi symbol, that's close enough. Upside-down V. Triangle. Next line: Uh, capital X, but with a line across the bottom legs. Single dot. Lower-case b. The pi again. Upside-down V. Triangle. Read those back."

Wendy did.

"We're on our way," Dipper said. Then with Mabel's phone he took a photo of the new inscription. But when he looked at the picture, it just showed the blank gray rock. "Thought so."

"What, Brobro?" Mabel asked.

Dipper sighed. "Do you see letters on the rock here?" He pointed.

Mabel looked at the rock, then back at him. "You got rocks in your head? The letters are up there."

"Yeah, the ones that Grunkle Stan carved." Dipper ran his hands over the second inscription. He couldn't feel any indentations in the stone. "Somehow I'm seeing an inscription right here, too. But it must be an illusion. It doesn't show up in the photographs."

"Huh," Mabel said. "Well, that's nearly normal for Gravity Falls. I mean, it's no Gremloblin or Multibear, is it?"

"No," Dipper said. "But it's a message from Bill Cipher. If I can figure out what it means."

They followed the Mystery Trail back to the Shack. Wendy gave him one brief hug and then said, "Hit the showers, man! You smell like leaf mould."

"Yeah," Dipper said, smiling weakly. "And then—I'm starving. I'm going to have a snack and try to figure out the inscription you wrote down. Where is it?"

"Right here." Wendy handed him a sheet from the inventory clipboard.

"Wait," he said. "Didn't you copy down—"

"Yeah, dude, on the blank side, right—huh!"

The paper  _was_  blank, or almost.

There was a tiny drawing, no bigger than a quarter, of a triangle with a top hat, bowtie, and one eye. And, oh yes, two arms, two legs, and a cane.

Dipper growled, "Dammit, Bill!"

The cipher had vanished as completely as Cipher had, or so it seemed.

* * *

 

 

**6: Around the Mall**

"Thanks for meeting me," Pacifica told Mabel. They were in the mall food court, on a Wednesday afternoon. All around them, teens were meeting, laughing, scuffling playfully, and eating everything from nachos to soy hot dogs.

"No prob, Paz!" Mabel said. "So . . . did you get your biz with your dad worked out?"

"Sort of," Pacifica said. "Here's the gist: I don't have to change schools. I can finish up at Gravity Falls High. In return, I won't tell Mom about how dad had my mind wiped or whatever. She doesn't know. Unless she  _did_  know, and Dad had her memory erased, too! I feel all paranoid!"

"Yeah, it can get to you," Mabel agreed. "It does Dipper. Of course, he was always paranoid. But that's justified. At our school, people actually do conspire against him."

"Yeah," Pacifica said, "so, well, we kind of have things settled, but Dad and I—we're not in a good place, you know? I mean, he's been doing so much better. Cleaned up the factory, even donates time to serving on the boards of about five local charities. Started a scholarship program over at the community college and all. But the more money he makes, the more ground he loses. He's getting all "We're Northwests!" again. And now he's all about rebuilding the Northwest name, patching up our reputation. As if we had one!"

"He's gotta be him," Mabel pointed out. "You gotta be you."

"Well—it's not like we have a  _choice,_ " Pacifica said. She sipped her soda and then smiled. "Unless you broke out that weird carpet thing again!"

Mabel guffawed. "I don't think so. You went all cray-cray with it the first time. Better let well enough alone."

Pacifica checked the time on her phone. "It's past three-thirty. Is Teek picking you up?"

"Not today," Mabel said. "He and his folks are off visiting somewhere overnight because they've got family they have to visit or some deal. It's cool. I mean, I love the guy, but, you know, it's good to spend a little time apart so that you can smooch when you get back together." Mabel had ordered cheesy fries, and she picked one up, swirled it in melted mozzarella, and then trailed strings of cheese up as she prepared to devour it. "You want to do something, you and me, I mean?" she asked.

"I don't know. Maybe. After having it out with Dad, I ought to feel better, but—I suppose I've moped for so long that I can't get out of the habit."

"Talked to Adam?" Mabel asked.

Pacifica shook her head. "I'm ashamed to."

"Aw, come on!" Mabel said. "You guys have been split up, for, like, a week!"

"Nine days," Pacifica corrected.

"Even better! Everybody knows that the best smooches are make-up smooches!" She reached over and patted Pacifica's hand. "Don't you want to talk to him?"

"I do," Pacifica admitted. "But—well, he said some mean things to me, and I was pretty rotten to him. I'm afraid it would be awkward." When Mabel took her hand away, Pacifica wiped strings of cheese from her fingers with a napkin. "OK, I'll think about texting him. You really wouldn't mind doing something with me?"

"Nope!" Mabel said. "Never! Let's find some trouble and get into it!"

"I'd rather not."

"Well—what do you want to do?" Mabel asked.

"Let's go window-shop a little," Pacifica suggested. "Something will come to us."

They trashed their napkins and cups and paper cartons and strolled over to FLOSSEE BANG.

That was an upscale boutique of stylish (and pricey) clothes. They tried on outfits and accessories for a while. Mabel particularly liked one dress, an iridescent greenish-blue with half-circular fan-like attachments that made her shoulders look like they were sprouting wings—or more likely, peacock tails, because they had that color and sheen. Pacifica's favorite was simpler, a pale green sun dress with a printed pattern of seashells and tropical fish.

The price tag on Mabel's fave was twelve hundred dollars. Pacifica's was, for a change, more economical: merely nine hundred and ninety-nine. As they came out of the dressing rooms after having put on their street clothes again, Mabel said, "I'm surprised they didn't throw us out of the store."

"They know me here," Pacifica said. "I'll buy something, so they won't be upset."

She got a charm bracelet, only three hundred dollars. Mabel bought a charm, a silver star. Only thirty-five bucks. "This is for you," she said, giving the small box to Pacifica. "A starter for your bracelet. To Llama from Shooting Star! Hey, where some boys at? I'm in a flirty mood!"

"Teek might find out," Pacifica warned.

"Eh, we don't have anything on paper!" Mabel said. "We trust each other, and he knows I'd never hook up, anyhow. But it's fun to flirt!"

"I'd say the comic-book store if you're looking for just a bunch of guys," Pacifica told her. "But they're all geeks there."

"Even better!" Mabel pronounced. "Geeks won't push it and become a nuisance, and they're always so grateful!"

"I don't see that as fun," Pacifica said.

"Aw, come on, Paz! Let's go break us some geek hearts!"

"I guess," Pacifica said. "It's not like I can think of anything better to do."

The comic-book store was not far from Hoo-Ha Owl's Pizzamatronic Jamboree—which had been completely refurbished since back when Soos was seeing Giffany. Then it had been completely demolished. They could smell the pizza and hear the animatronic animal band playing pre-recorded music as they passed the place. "There it is," Pacifica said.

The comic-book place, Stapled in the Center, was long and narrow and full of shelves and blue-white fluorescent light. The customers, all teens and all guys, browsed and avoided eye contact. In the back of the store, four of them were playing some bizarre-o card game—the kind, Mabel thought, that Dipper would enjoy if he had friends to play it with. She heard one of the guys say, "I'm gonna play the Serpent of Destruction."

Another one, with thick glasses and a big nose and a spatter of acne across his cheeks, said in a squeaky voice, "I was so waiting for that! Hah! I play the Crushing Boot on your serpent's head! Stomp!" He captured the other guy's card. Or something. Mabel wasn't sure what the game was, except it wasn't much like Grunkle Stan's favorite, cutthroat poker.

Of course, his brand of poker wasn't much like anyone else's, either. Most normal poker games weren't played with two decks, one on the table, one split up and secreted throughout the dealer's clothing.

Whatever.

"Let's go," Pacifica said. "Nobody's even looking at us."

"Yeah, they are," Mabel said. "When I tell you, glance over to the left, quick. Ready—now!"

Pacifica looked around in time to see three guys gasp and duck down behind the shelves they had been peering over. Mabel whispered, "The elusive and easily frightened geek in his native habitat. It's a mystery to scientists how these rare creatures ever manage to reproduce."

However, even she had to admit the pickings were dismal. They went back toward the front of the store—and a good-looking guy, tall and maybe sixteen, said, "Can I help you ladies find something?" He had medium-long black hair, a good complexion, and dark blue eyes. And a straight nose, good teeth, and a mouth that Mabel thought looked interesting, full lips and dimples at the corners. He was wearing a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, gray pants, and an unbuttoned gray suit vest.

"We're just browsing," Pacifica said, turning away.

"Wait a minute, hang on," Mabel said, then asked the guy, "Do you have a romance section—or is it just you?"

The guy chuckled. "Well—romance? That's a hard one. We don't get many pretty girls in here."

"Pretty girls!" Mabel playfully shoved him. "Shut up!"

Staggering a little, the guy said, "But the magazines that girls usually like are over against the far wall there. Front section."

Ah, Mabel thought, in the deserted corner. "Come and show us?" she asked. "Oh, I'm Mabel! And this is my bfftm, Pacifica. And you are—?"

"My name's Jude," the guy said. "Hi."

As they walked across the store, Pacifica asked, "So do you work here, or-?"

"Not full-time. Just helping out today. All right, these are all in the Markie line here—"

"All six shelves?" Mabel asked.

"Well, yeah, it's sort of a publishing industry. Now, there's the classic  _Markie and His Pals_ , the AU  _Markie_ lines—in these, he's married to Bitty, in those to Veronique, and in the ones here, he's dead—and, let's see, the  _Bugheads_ , the  _Veroniques_ , the _Bittys_ , of course the  _Bitty and Veroniques_ , the  _Riversides_ —they go with the TV continuity, not the comics—the  _Markie and His Pals Kids_ , and, so on and so on."

"Huh," Mabel said. "I thought that was just those old cartoons from TV."

"No, it's one of the most successful sets of titles," Jude said. "If you want something a little more adventurous, there's  _Spider-Guy and Ann Marie_ , by a woman writer-artist team. More humorous than the mainline Spider-Guys. And, um, this series called  _Faithful_  is a three-girl supernatural investigation team. It's written by Josh Whitton, you know, the guy behind the old  _Muffy the Vampire Staker_  and  _Angelic,_ the TV shows, speaking of which, over there are continuations of the two series. Lots of girls like them. And this one—

"So many comics!" Mabel exclaimed. "OK, so I'm a gal who likes being artistic and having adventures and being romanced. What would I like most?"

"I think you might like to try manga," Jude told her.

"Yeah! I'm always up for eating!" Mabel exclaimed.

Pacifica rolled her eyes. "Not ' _mangia,_ '" she said, giving the word a soft g. "Manga!" This time she pronounced the g like the one in  _goat._  "It's like, Japanese cartoons. It's an art form. Even I know that!"

"This one," Jude said, picking up a magazine, "is called  _Summer House._  It's about a teen girl, Yuki, who goes with her family to a lakeside house for a whole summer-long vacation. She has to sort out how she feels about her boyfriend, who's mad because she's gone away from Tokyo for three months, and then she runs into three guys at the lake, and each one's sort of interested in her. It's by Kimura Akana—a girl artist-writer—and won awards. No, you start on the last page and go backward. And you start with the right panel on each page and read to the left."

"Like the Brits and their bonkers driving!" Mabel said, scanning through the first couple of pages.

"I don't think there's anything here for me," Pacifica said. "I'm not much into comics or even movies."

"Me, either," Jude told her. "I mean, not really. I kill time with them, but I'm not a fanatic."

"But you work here," Pacifica said.

"Well, just sort of. Just stepping in for a friend of mine who's out sick. I read comics casually, and my friends talk them up, so I know about them, but I'm not really a full-time employee, just a temp. 'Scuse me, I've got to go check these guys out." He hurried over to the register.

"He likes you!" Mabel said.

"I don't even  _know_  him," Pacifica told her.

"Like that couldn't be fixed in about five minutes! He's cute, isn't he?"

"Not bad," Pacifica granted. "Tall, and he looks like he might be into swimming or something. He looks like he has good abs and pecs."

"Come on, those guys are leaving." Mabel led Pacifica over to the register. "I'll take the manga," she said. "And I promise not to eat it, ha-ha! How much?"

"That's $9.99," Jude said.

Mabel reached for her money. "Ring it up! By the way, do you go to Gravity Falls High?"

"Me? No," Jude said. "I'm just here for a few weeks, visiting my uncle. I'm from Calgary. I'm a foreigner."

"Up in Canada!" Pacifica said. "I've been there!"

"To the Stampede?" Jude asked, taking Mabel's ten-dollar bill and giving her back a penny before bagging her purchase.

"Yeah," Pacifica said. "And we went to Banff and Lake Louise. It's beautiful up there!"

Smiling, Jude said, "I'm starting to think it's pretty beautiful down here, too."

"When do you get off work?" Mabel asked.

Jude glanced at a clock on the wall. "Five. About half an hour from now."

"Mabel!" Pacifica said.

"C'mon, Jude's Canadian! We ought to build up good US-Canadian relations so they won't invade us and make us all eat French fries with mayonnaise!" Mabel turned to Jude. "You got plans for dinner?"

He smiled. "Nope. I thought I'd grab a burger here in the Mall."

"No! Let's eat together! There are lots of restaurants in town. Do you like Mexican? Fish? Grease? You name it, we've got it!"

"I could go for a pizza," Jude admitted.

"OK, you talked us into it! Not Hoo-Ha's, though. There's a good place called Deliziosa about four blocks from here. But we'll pay our share, OK?"

Jude shrugged. "How about I buy the pizza, you girls buy the drinks?"

"Deal!" Mabel pronounced. "And while we eat, you can tell us all about Canada! Hey—speak in Canadian for us!"

Sighing, Jude said, "You're two really nice girls, eh?"

Mabel chortled. "You said it, tiger! Pacifica, why are you turning red?"

"It's  _hot_  in here," Pacifica said.

"Nah," Mabel told her. "It's just him!"

* * *

**7: Down in the Lab**

Dr. Stanford Pines still maintained his old laboratory space beneath the Mystery Shack. When his and his wife Lorena's house was finished, it would include its own spacious library/lab room, but even then, Ford intended to keep the Shack labs operational. After all, there he had three floors of equipment and specimens, as much as a reasonable-sized house could contain. And there was all the potential fuss of packing and moving. And he still held legal title to the Shack, though the deed had been re-recorded as a joint document between him and Stan.

And, since Ford had learned of the difficulties Stan had run into when Gideon wanted the Shack for his own, they had carefully incorporated under both state and federal law so the deed was no longer under the jurisdiction only of Gravity Falls law—where, thanks to Quentin Trembley, the "Finders Keepers" clause made it legal for anybody who could produce a deed to own whatever property was named in the document. Now anyone trying to steal title to the Shack would be stopped by state and federal laws.

Anyway, Ford had decided that, owing to considerations of equipment, convenience, and physical space, not to mention the mystic protective field around the structure, he needed to maintain his right to use the subterranean levels of the Shack for research and development, so he hung onto the labs.

Come to that, he kept meaning to get around to emptying the emergency shelter complex, concealed beneath a fake tree in the forest—the bunker, Dipper called it. He would need space for some of the equipment he'd kept there in his contingency retreat, and there would be enough room in the Shack labs. Also, there were certain disturbing loose ends down there that needed attending to. . ..

However, at the moment, Ford had other immediate concerns. He had asked Dipper to join him, and the two went down to the second lab level, where beneath the harsh blue-white glare of a fluorescent light, they sat at a table. Ford plopped down a thick manila folder of documents and pictures, as well as his Journal 6, to which he referred now and then.

"First," Ford said, settling into his office chair, "tell me about this experience of Pacifica Northwest's."

Dipper confessed, "There's not a lot to tell. She got catfished by some guy online and sent him a picture of herself, and then he ghosted."

Ford stared at his great-nephew. "I . . . don't have the faintest idea what that means."

Dipper grinned self-consciously. In fact, he had picked up most of the lingo from Mabel. Though he had an interesting Internet history, Dipper spent zero time chatting to others, because that made him feel self-conscious and phony.

He said, "Uhm, 'catfished' means some guy, or maybe even girl, pretended to be somebody else in a computer chat room. He asked Pacifica to send him a photo of herself, wearing a sweater, and he was supposed to send her a selfie—a picture he took of himself—in return. She sent hers, and then he ghosted. That means he just stopped responding and never sent the photo he'd promised, as if she had turned invisible to him. I guess usually they say that when someone who's been dating just cuts off communication with no reasons why. Like, 'Jane was dating Harold, but he ghosted on her' would mean that Harold wouldn't answer the phone or respond to emails and all. Like he just wanted her to forget him."

"I see," Ford said. "Now, you said something about a sweater she was wearing?"

"Right. Remember Weirdmageddon—well, I mean, you don't remember a lot of it because Bill captured you on the first day, but when we holed up in the Shack and formed the rescue team, Mabel made sweaters for everybody—even Chutzpar, the Manotaur—but she gave Pacifica one of her own sweaters, one of Mabel's favorites. It was the one with the llama on the front, and that's why on the Zodiac—"

"Miss Northwest took the spot marked with a llama," Ford mused. "That's informative. And on one level, disturbing."

He showed Dipper the enigmatic clues he had gathered, including the note that read "7 in Oregon." Along with that—a list of the dead, now running to a quarter of a page.

"What does this mean?" Dipper asked.

Ford leaned back in his chair. "Mason, I'm becoming more and more convinced that someone is trying to ferret out the identities of people who were represented on the Zodiac. I'm not sure why."

Dipper had been hesitating. Now he blurted, "I know you don't approve, but I went to consult Bill Cipher in the clearing around his statue. He confirms what you've been saying. He gave me this confusing rhyme." He reached into his vest and pulled out a slip of paper, which he passed to Ford.

Stanford adjusted his glasses and read Dipper's transcription of Cipher's words:

* * *

_Ten of you,_

_Most old, some new._

_Each is right, each is wrong._

_Each is weak, each is strong_

_One won't do,_

_Or three or two—_

_The power of ten_

_Is a slim chance to win._

* * *

"It sounds like Bill's nonsense," Ford agreed. "He is so infuriating! You can't trust anything he tells you, because he always has meanings layered over meanings." He drummed the six fingers of his right hand on the table top. "I hope that whatever remains of Bill in the Mindscape isn't secretly re-gathering his power. How did he appear to you, Mason? Did he physically manifest?"

"No, he was just in the Mindscape. But—he didn't show up. I mean, visually. I didn't dream that I saw him. I just spoke with him in the dark."

"Are you sure it was Bill?"

"Pretty sure. I mean, the voice sounded just like his, and he even tricked me. He sent a message back, carved in stone and in code—well, not a code, a cipher—but the carvings in the rock weren't real, and Mabel couldn't see the inscription. In fact, it faded out as I watched it. Wendy even wrote down the symbols as I dictated them on the phone, but her writing vanished too. What was left was a pencil sketch of Bill, and Wendy swears she didn't do it." He reached in his pocket for the inventory sheet and showed it to Ford.

"Mm. Not unlike a self-portrait. A Cipher selfie, I suppose. Do you remember what the cipher message said?"

"Not really," Dipper confessed. "See, I thought we had a copy of it, so I didn't try to memorize it. I do remember some of the letters, and that it rhymed."

Ford frowned. "Rhymed?"

"I mean the last few letters of each word—there were only two words—were the same. Anyhow, the symbols looked like the same ones in Grunkle Stan's fake carving on the Talking Rock."

"Oh, the 'Welcome Suckers' thing," Ford said.

Dipper nodded. "From the overlap, I figured out these letters."

He produced his last bit of paper, a 3x5 note card: S _ R _ _ _ ER _ _ _ _ ER.

Dipper explained, "Now, whatever comes after the first S is unique to the cipher. Whatever comes first in the second word is also unique. But the three letters after the first R and the second, third, and fourth letters in the second word are the same symbols, so I figure they rhyme. It's just too short for me to figure it out with letter frequency tables."

"STRANGER DANGER," Ford said drily.

Dipper blinked. "Why . . . couldn't I see that?"

"Because it doesn't help us much," Ford said, laying down the note card. "Like most of what Bill says, it's equivocal."

Dipper tilted his head to look at his great-uncle. "You mean it could be taken two different ways."

"At _least_  two," Ford said. "It could be a warning to beware of a stranger. Or it could be saying that the danger we face is stranger than anything we've encountered. Or—who really knows with Bill? Where did you seem to be when you spoke with him? What was the landscape like?"

"I didn't see. We were in the dark," Dipper said. "Really, pitch-dark. It didn't seem scary, though, sort of . . . warm and enclosing, I guess? And he said something strange. He said he was the old Axolotl's prisoner, or that the Axolotl had him or something."

"Hmm. The Axolotl is a force that keeps the Multiverse balanced. Not exactly a god, not exactly even a being, more an awareness, an embodiment of an ideal. In my journey through alternate dimensions, I encountered an Oracle that spoke of the Axolotl. And from what I've learned from Stanley, Bill appealed to that force just before Stanley destroyed him—in fact, from my own dreams and brief encounters since Weirdmageddon, I think Bill's last deal was with the Axolotl. He begged to be allowed to return from annihilation, and the price was that he would reform. I don't mean 're-form' as in 'take shape again,' but as in 'try to be a better—uh, trans-dimensional demon'. I'm not sure Bill ever meant to mend his ways or intended to—but if he gave his word to the Axolotl, he would be compelled to obey some rules."

"That's a punishment for Bill in itself," Dipper pointed out. "He's chaotic. Rules stifle him."

"Indeed, the rescue may be worse than the alternative, from Bill's point of view." Ford picked up the poem and stared at it as though daring it to give up its secrets. "Ten of you, most old, some new," he mused. "Yes, that sort of fits the Zodiac. There are ten of us represented on it. But 'some old, some new?' We're all still alive."

Dipper said, "I don't even want to bring this up, but—remember Robbie Valentino? The boy who wore the hoodie with the broken heart?"

"Oh, yes," Ford said. "When we tried to form the Zodiac, I remember he was uncomfortable holding hands. Not as bad as my brother, but—"

"He's not wearing the hoodie any longer," Dipper said. "He gave the original one to Teek—T.K. O'Grady, Mabel's boyfriend."

Ford's dark eyebrows rose. "Really? Has anything significant happened in Robbie's life lately?"

Dipper almost laughed. "He got married! To Tambry. Right after their high-school graduation. And they've gone to Los Angeles for a while to make a professional recording of their music."

"Of course," Ford said. "That change in his life situation might well have changed his outlook, his attitude, and might disqualify him. And I'm sure he has no inkling of what he did, but in giving the emblem to T.K., Robbie symbolically gave him entrance to the Zodiac. Is T.K. by any chance not happy in love?"

"That . . . depends," Dipper said. "He loves Mabel, but—well, Mabel is Mabel. Sometimes she makes it difficult for him. I don't think he'll stop loving her, but sometimes he's not exactly happy."

"The young lover who languishes," Ford said. "Yes, it may well be that T.K. is now part of the Zodiac, and Robbie no longer is."

"Then you and Grunkle Stan aren't on the Zodiac any longer," Dipper said. "You and he both are married men now."

"No, I think we are." Ford smiled. "It isn't that a person represented on the Zodiac can't be married. It's more a case of fitting the patterns—the broken-hearted young man is an archetype—the pining young lover. When he finds a, well, we'll unscientifically call it a true love, he disqualifies himself. You're the Pine Tree—sturdy of purpose, with a solid heart, but flexible. Soos is the Question Mark, the unknown quantity, with hidden depths. Miss Northwest is the unsuspected warrior—llamas can be unexpectedly fierce."

"I thought they were sort of like big lam—uh, sheep, I mean."

"Look up 'berserk llama syndrome,'" Ford advised him. "Miss Northwest appears to be docile and obedient on the outside, like a lamb—but when pressed, she's a fierce warrior. Why are you looking embarrassed?"

"Nothing. I have a lamb phobia," Dipper said hastily.

"Your sister is the Shooting Star—dazzlingly brilliant in her way, but unpredictable. My brother is the arcane symbol—like a fish about to feed. Fish are symbolic of those who move below the surface of life, those who are slippery and wily. You see? Marriage wouldn't change his nature, or mine—of course, I am the freak."

"No," Dipper objected. "You're not—"

"Oh, yes, I am," Ford said, waggling his six fingers. "Marked as different from birth. My difference isn't affected by marriage. But the other symbols—Well, Fiddleford is still the studious man of science. Wendy is still cool when danger threatens. Hm. I wonder . . . the Pentacle—that was young Gideon. He's no longer a fake psychic—but he was, at least temporarily, a wolf boy. Pentacles figure heavily in werewolf lore. He may still be on the wheel, but perhaps not."

"Do you think that Bill's warning means we shouldn't trust Teek?" Dipper asked anxiously. "Is he a danger to us?"

"I wouldn't think so," Ford said. "It would be more likely that—hmm."

"What?" Dipper asked.

"I was thinking back to last winter, Mason. Wendy, Ice on the Zodiac, was menaced by the T'klatlumodh. She said that was the first time in her whole life that she'd ever felt a strong personal fear—but she faced it and dealt with it, so her cool courage is intact."

"I—guess that's good news," Dipper said.

Ford didn't seem to hear him as he continued, "Then, at nearly the same time, Gideon was bitten by a werewolf. It's possible those constituted the opening gambit in the—well, call him the Unknown—the Unknown's game. If the Zodiac, as embodied in the people it symbolizes, is somehow a threat to him—or her—or even it—it's possible that the Unknown is aware of that and in moving against Wendy and Gideon was trying to weaken or destroy the team."

"And now Pacifica's in his sights," Dipper said. "What should we do?"

"I can see only one thing to do," Ford returned, his voice determined. "We have to find this Unknown and make sure he, or she, can't destroy us. That may mean—" he broke off, apparently hesitant to continue.

Dipper finished for him: "We have to destroy him first."

* * *

At about that moment, Pacifica and Mabel walked out of the pizza restaurant with Jude. "This has been fun," he said.

"Yeah, it has!" Mabel replied with enthusiasm. She turned, walking backwards so she could face Jude. "Hey, here, take this." She produced a yellow card and handed it to Jude.

He looked at it. "The Mystery Shack?"

"Yeah, it's a great tourist attraction!" Mabel said. "When you get time, drop in and see everything. That's a free pass. I'll be there!" She nudged Pacifica with her elbow. "Paz can be there—just give me a call when you plan to come! My number's on the card. Uh—Paz, you  _can_  be there, right?"

"Oh, sure," Pacifica said. She smiled at Jude. "I had a good time, too."

Mabel playfully shoved Jude's shoulder. "See? Something's happening here! So—don't be a stranger!"

* * *

**8: At Baggage Claim**

Stanford had no idea what Dr. Erasmus Helving looked like, only that he was a British scholar who had written extensively on matters of the supernatural. That Saturday morning, therefore, when he arrived at the Portland airport, Ford came equipped with a hand-lettered placard that bore Helving's name, as neatly block-printed with a broad-tipped marker by Mabel. She had also decorated it with stickers of bunnies.

Feeling as if it made him stand out even more than his polydactyl hands, Ford rather awkwardly located the baggage carousel for the morning flight in from Chicago and stood holding up the placard at chest level. As if to counteract the colorful sign, he wore a dark-blue suit and conservative tie. People hurrying out with their luggage gave him curious glances, but no one stopped.

Then Ford noticed a trim man, probably in his fifties but maybe in his sixties, standing amid a group of three suitcases. He looked about the right age—short gray hair, thin, rather prominent nose, patient expression, brown tweed suit that looked a trifle baggy. He stood as if waiting for something to happen.

Ford approached him. "Dr. Helving?"

The stranger's expression brightened at once. "Yes, I am. I just noticed your sign," he said with a smile. "And you are—?"

"Stanford Pines," Ford said, shaking hands. "I've read your articles and books, and I'm the one who kept pestering you with questions last December. Thanks for agreeing to come in for a consultation."

"Quite the contrary," Helving said with a chuckle. "It's my pleasure, I assure you, Dr. Pines. Thank  _you_  for paying for my airfare and for putting me up. I've always wanted to visit this area of your country—Twin Peaks in Washington, your corner of Oregon." His voice sounded thin and reedy, with a lilting north-of-England sort of accent.

Ford hefted the two larger suitcases. "It's about two hours and a bit to Gravity Falls," he said. "Odd name for a town, I know. It's a fascinating place, full of anomalies. And also full of eccentric people!"

"I shall be interested in learning about the history, the mysteries, and the eccentrics," Helving said, picking up the smallest of the three suitcases and falling into step beside Ford.

"Oh, you'll hear all you want!" Ford assured him. "However, I urgently wanted to consult you on one specific matter. On the drive over, I can tell you about the problems we've been having. It involves the T'klatlumodh and the Wheel of Sperling."

"The Zodiac wheel. My word," Helving said. "No one has seriously believed in the T'klatlumodh's existence for, oh, close to five hundred years!"

"Yes, but as I told you in my electronic mails, it very definitely is involved in the present case."

"Indeed. I'll ask you to tell me everything all over again, then, just to make sure it's all fresh in my mind. I had long thought the T'klatlumodh was just a Medieval tale—though, to be sure, I have several times encountered references to what might be a modern instance of the thing."

"It manifested in Gravity Falls," Ford assured him. "Classic materialization, a swarm of black spirit-serpents. It was called into our dimension by a  _Schreckgesicht,_ a horrific demonic effigy of a face very much like the one described by von Zauberer in his book  _Geheimnisse der Teufelsleute_  and pictured in the woodcut on page 42."

"Have you actually seen that volume?" Helving asked. "It's an exceedingly rare book!"

"I've only seen the facsimile version published in Amsterdam in 1914," Ford said. "I have a partial copy—mine was damaged in a World War II bombing, but the first half of the book is intact, up to page 201."

"Ah. I have held in my hands an extraordinarily well-preserved exemplar of the first printing. Extraordinary incunabulum. You know, it's believed to have been printed in 1470, only fifteen years after the Gutenberg Bible."

"And five after von Zauberer's horrible death," Ford agreed. They had reached the short-term lot. "This is my car." He unlocked the trunk of the Lincoln and stored the suitcases there. The two men got into the automobile, Ford paid the parking fee, and they drove out of the airport lot. "Sir," Ford asked, "are you hungry? If so, I can recommend some good restaurants along the way."

"Oh, no, no, my dear fellow, not at all," his passenger said with good humor. "I had a late breakfast—for me—and am quite set until tea-time. Will I be staying at an hotel?"

"No, my friend and former colleague Dr. McGucket owns an enormous house, and you'll be his guest for the three days you can spare us. My wife and I are temporarily staying there too, so it will be easy for us to consult with you."

Modestly, Helving said, "I didn't anticipate being a guest in your home. Oh, that's very kind indeed."

"It's the least we can do," Ford insisted. "Now, as I told you, all of this seems to tie in with a version of the so-called Zodiac of Sperling—"

* * *

Behind them, not far from the airport, a visibly confused and disoriented man staggered onto a highway overpass. He hesitated, but in the end did what he had been ordered to do: he climbed on the rail, ignored honks from some passing cars, and poised like a diver until a semi came rumbling along at high speed on the highway below.

The man launched himself and landed on the concrete an instant before the semi struck him.

The gruesome accident snarled traffic for hours. The victim had no identification of any kind. His clothing was of cheap Sprawl-Mart provenance. Though it was very difficult to determine an age, the medical examiner finally settled for "Male, age 50-70." What he had looked like before the accident was conjectural.

His blood type was O-positive. He had no teeth—and no dentures. Recovering fingerprints was problematic, though one thumb was nearly intact.

He had no illegal drugs in his system. He did have traces of lisinopril, a prescription drug used to treat hypertension. An examination of stomach contents indicated that his last meal had been coffee and a doughnut or sweet roll.

The best estimate of his height was five feet, nine inches. His weight was approximately 160 pounds.

About two hours after the accident, an alert policeman inspecting the bridge discovered a pair of eyeglasses. They had apparently been dropped or had fallen as the man had leaped.

The best guess of the police was that the man was a homeless person.

However, two days later they discovered that the eyeglasses had not come from the USA. The brand of lens was Swiss. The frames were French.

Ordinarily, European tourists to Oregon do not divest themselves of identification and walk a mile and a half from the airport in order to commit suicide.

The case dossier wound up in the hands of Detective John Rao. "Why me?" he groaned.

The sergeant who had tossed the file to him said, "Because you never give up."

With a groan, Rao opened the folder and began to read.

* * *

**9: Behind the Counter**

Dipper was up to his ears in customers that Saturday morning. Everyone and his sister wanted to buy genuine imitation fake paranormal junk, and between counting cash and running credit cards, he started to feel a little panicked and frantic.

When the snack room closed for business at 2:00, Soos had Wendy come over. "Dude, let's start two lines. You can work this one, and I'll use the register outside the snack bar."

Dipper nodded, grateful for the help. Wendy called out, "Folks, we'll take care of all your purchases. I'm opening register two, right over here!"

The flood divided into two streams, and the pressure fell off. Finally, at four, the bulk of the customers had come, bought, and gone. The bus traffic had ended, except for one late bus that would pull in around five p.m. Now they just had to deal with routine car traffic, and the gift shop began to look like Dipper remembered it from his first summer there—clumps of three and four tourists, not people jammed in wall to wall.

Mabel toured the floor, straightening and tidying up, removing the inevitable broken merchandise, and Teek helped her. At four-thirty, during a real lull, Soos came over with a cute blonde girl in tow. Dipper guessed she was about fifteen. "Hey, dawg," Soos said, "I couldn't help noticing that you, like, need help. This here is Traci with an 'I.' Traci, um, don't tell me, Gilroy."

"Niederland," she corrected with a smile.

"Almost had it, girl dude! Traci Niederland, and her family, like, moved into town not long ago, and she's looking for a summer job or some junk? And she's worked retail before in a record store—"

"Shoe store," she corrected. "I know how to work a cash register."

"Shoe store, dude," Soos said, as if the mistake had been Dipper's. "Remember that. Traci Niederland, worked in a shoe store for her cousin—"

"Uncle," she said.

"—yeah, and so I'm gonna hire her. What I'm thinking, we'll get another register and put it at the other end of the counter, right there? We'll move the eyeball jar, maybe put it up on a shelf there behind the counter—the eyeballs aren't a big seller, girl dude—and, where was I?"

"We'll have two check-out lines," Dipper said.

"That's a great idea!" Soos said, smiling in his buck-toothed way. "Um, OK, Traci, so I told you about the salary, and, um, oh, yeah, if you want to eat in the snack bar, it's like, free, up to ten dollars a day, and, OK, you've signed all the papers and junk, and I just need your folks's signature on the form I gave you—did I give it to you?"

"I've got it in my purse," Traci said. "I'll have my mom sign it and bring it in on Tuesday."

"Good!" Soos said. "Then, um, Dipper, I guess you ought to show Traci the ropes and everything. Oh, and introduce the rest of the staff. And I got to go on the last Mystery Tour now."

"Well," Dipper said to Traci. "Welcome aboard, I guess."

The last tourists went out with Soos to the tram—this trip would be a lean one, the tram only half full—and Dipper called out, "Hey, guys, come and meet Traci!"

Mabel and Teek had been straightening out the book rack. Wendy came in from a bathroom break. Dipper said, "Gang, this is Traci Niederland. She's new in town and Soos is hiring her to run another register. We'll have two sales lines, beginning Tuesday."

"Cool!" Wendy said.

"Traci, this is Wendy Corduroy. She's the Assistant Manager and the coolest person in Gravity Falls. If you have any questions, just ask her, and she'll help you out."

"Thanks," Traci said, smiling shyly. Like Wendy, she had a little spatter of freckles across her nose and cheeks, but she didn't look as outdoorsy as Dipper's Lumberjack Girl.

"No prob."

Dipper said, "And this is my twin sister, Mabel. Oh, I didn't tell you, but our last name is Pines, and our great-uncles sort of own the Mystery Shack."

"Oh, that's cool!" Traci said. "Twins—I can see the family resemblance."

"Yeah," Mabel said, "except we're not identical twins."

Teek said, "You couldn't be, because—"

"Because I got the awesome gene!" Mabel pronounced. "My brobro Dipper here wound up with the dork genes."

"Hey!" Dipper said.

"It's true!" Mabel insisted. She poked Dipper's face repeatedly, chanting, "Dork! Dork! Dork!"

"Stop it," Dipper said.

"Um," Teek said, "I'm Ticknor O'Grady, but—"

"Bwahhh!" Mabel laughed. "Everybody calls him 'Teek,' Traci."

"Yeah," Teek said with a one-shouldered shrug. "Just call me Teek."

"Teek," Traci said. She turned and asked, "Um, and is Dipper your real—"

"Nope!" Mabel said. "His real name's Ma—"

"My real name," Dipper said, overriding her, "isn't important. I've been called Dipper ever since I was little. I prefer that."

Traci smiled shyly. "Okay, Dipper."

"Heads up, guys," Wendy said. "Family of six approaching the Shack. I gotta go do the museum tour. Dip, why don't you let Traci handle the register if they want souvenirs? Show her how we do things."

"Sure," Dipper said.

"I'll help, too!" Mabel announced. "Hey, we're fifteen, except for Teek—he's sixteen—and Wendy, who's so old—"

"Not funny!" Dipper said. "Wendy's a senior in high school."

"So," Mabel said, "how old are you?"

"I turned fifteen in April," Traci said.

"When did you move to the Falls?"

"Mabel," Dipper complained.

"Come on, I'm interested!" Mabel insisted.

Traci said, "I don't mind, Dipper. We moved in about two weeks ago. Our house is on Gopher Circle."

"Oh," Teek said. "Just down the street about a mile."

She nodded. "We have that house with the green roof? The second one on the left?"

"The Morgensens used to live there," Teek said. "He worked for the Northwest Company, but I think he retired."

"We heard they moved to Florida," Traci told him. "Anyway, there's my dad, he's a photographer, and my mom, she's a nutritionist, and my little brother Sandy, he's five years old—"

"He sounds  _adorable_!" Mabel gushed.

"Not so much when you get to know him," Traci replied with a grimace. "Anyway, I'm going to get my learner's permit, and Dad told me if I could save up five hundred dollars, he'll get me a car when I turn sixteen, so—summer job!"

"You'll like it here," Mabel assured her. "Gravity Falls is a small town and kinda, what's the word I'm looking for here—"

"Eccentric," Teek suggested.

"One of a kind," Dipper offered.

"Freakin' weird!" Mabel finished. "Listen, you're gonna hear all kinds of strange rumors. I'll tell you up front, they're all true. There really are some paranormal creatures around—but they're all harmless, right, Dip?"

"Um—the Gremloblin, the spider people, the—"

"Mostly harmless!" Mabel corrected.

"Forty-two," Teek murmured.

They all looked at him. "Never mind," he said.

Mabel leaned toward Traci and said, "And confidentially, there's a lot of h-o-t guys in town! But I got dibs on Teek, and Dip's been spoken for, too. No worries, I can fix you up! I'm like the Ninja of match-makers!"

"Mabel," Dipper said, "maybe Traci would like to make friends herself, without your help."

"Too late!" Mabel crowed. "Now, next Friday we're gonna have a sleepover, my bffs and me, right here in the Shack. You're invited. There'll be about five of us—hey, Wendy, you up for an overnight next Friday?"

"Count me out, Mabes!" Wendy said as she led the group in from the museum. "I gotta get some sleep if Saturday's gonna be anything like today!"

"Four of us, anyway," Mabel said. "Five with you. You in?"

"Let me think about it," Traci said. "I don't know if—"

"Mabel!" Dipper said. "If Traci doesn't want to come, she doesn't have to!"

"Wrong! It's mandatory!" Mabel proclaimed.

Traci said, "All right, but, um, right now I think we've got customers."

"OK," Dipper said, slipping off the stool. "You'll get a name tag and all next week. Now, the credit card reader's a little bit slow. This register look familiar?"

"Sure," Traci said.

"Right. Here's the bar-code scanner. If an item doesn't have a bar code, just ring it up the way you probably know how to do. Are you new to Oregon?"

Traci nodded. "We used to live in Idaho."

"OK, good news, Oregon doesn't have a sales tax, so that simplifies the job a lot."

"Yeah," Wendy, who was leaning on the counter, said, "but the state income tax is murder! Here comes your first customer. Oops, got more pulling in. Let me run and sell museum tickets!"

The kid who came up to the counter had picked out a Mr. Mystery Money Machine, a trinket manufactured in China. Essentially, you rolled a rectangle of newsprint cut to the size of a bill in on one side, and it appeared to come out the other as a twenty-dollar bill. Dipper genially warned him, "It doesn't really print money, you know. It's a trick."

"Yeah, but I'll fool the kids at school," the boy said with a gap-toothed grin.

Traci scanned the toy in—five dollars even—and the boy handed her a ten. She made change, bagged the toy and put the receipt in, and said, "Thank you, and visit us again."

"And here," Mabel said, popping up so suddenly she startled the little boy, "is a set of Mystery Shack stickers! For free! That's the Mabel difference!" She popped the sheet of peel-off stickers into his bag—a miniature What Is the Mystery Shack? bumper sticker, the Sascrotch, the Jackalope, and other exhibits, a dozen in all.

"Thanks!" the boy's mom said. "Jerome, have you picked out anything yet? Jeffrey? Jeannie?"

The three kids ranged from about twelve down to maybe six. Each one of them bought a souvenir, though they spread the purchasing process over about fifteen minutes, and Traci handled all the sales. "I think you got it," Dipper said.

"Yeah," Mabel told her, "but it gets bonkers crazy in the mornings! Hey, by the way, my man Teek is the cook! If you like burgers—do you like burgers?"

"Sure," Traci said.

"Then you'll love the Shackburgers! Teek would make you one right now, but he and I are going to the movies tonight.  _Inside Out!_  An intense psychological study of a dangerously deranged child!"

"Um—I'm pretty sure it's an animated family comedy," Teek said.

Mabel's eyes narrowed. "That's what they  _want_ you to think! Hey, Traci, want me to find a date for you? We can double-date!"

"Not tonight, thanks," Traci said. "Maybe some other time."

"Then come on, Teek! We'll get something to eat, then hit the movies for the 5:15 Late Matinee! We'll save a dollar and a half each!"

After they had left—Dipper heard Teek's car start up and crunch out of the parking lot—he said to Traci, "My sister gets a little intense."

"She seems like fun," Traci said. "OK, now I saw you marking something down when we made the sales, so what's that?"

"Inventory sheets," Dipper said. "Let me show you the system."

* * *

Wendy and Dipper dropped Traci off at her house when the Shack closed at six. "She's a pretty girl," Wendy said.

"I'd call her more  _cute_ ," Dipper told her.

"Just your age, too. I'm gonna have to keep an eye on the two of you, I can tell!" Wendy teased.

"Don't worry," Dipper told her. "Mabel will have her hooked up and engaged to somebody by the end of next week. She's suddenly back into full-tilt matchmaker mode again."

"You don't mind eatin' with my family tonight?" Wendy asked.

"No, but I hope your brothers don't challenge me to races every five minutes." Wendy's two younger brothers were convinced they could run a hundred-meter sprint faster than Dipper, who had once won a state high-school championship in that sport. No matter how many times he beat them, they clung to the belief.

"I'll call 'em off," she assured him.

Manly Dan was getting around fine again, his broken leg completely healed. He and his crew were working hard on the houses they were building for Ford and Stan—though Dan was grumbling that a key supplier had gone bankrupt, throwing them way off schedule, so what with untangling the resulting legal mess, he already knew they were going to miss the fall date he'd estimated as the construction deadline.

That didn't matter. Ford and Lorena, Stan and Sheila were comfortable in their wing of the McGucket mansion, and Fiddleford and Mayellen were in no hurry for them to move out. "Trouble is," Dan growled at dinner—steaks, roasted potatoes, garlic-braised green beans, and a gigantic chocolate-iced chocolate cake—"can't do nothin' much until the court proceedings end, probably along in October! The winter's gonna close in. Won't be able to do all the plumbing 'cause the pipes would freeze, and that's gonna throw us into late spring next year."

"Grunkle Stan says a good house is worth waiting for," Dipper assured him, astounded at how a sixteen-ounce sirloin made three bites for the big lumberjack.

"He's a good man," Dan said. "Hey, did I ever tell you that I built the Mystery Shack for your uncle Stanford? 'Course for years I thought Stanley was Stanford. Shoulda known, 'cause of the finger thing—you know your uncle Stanford has twelve fingers?"

"I've noticed that," Dipper said, trying to hide a smile.

"Yeah, he's a natural wonder," Dan said. He cut a slab of cake as big as Dipper's head. "Hurry up and finish, boys. We got some bowlin' to do!" To Dipper, he said, "Father-son tournament in Eugene! Booyah!"

"Good luck," Dipper said.

After the Corduroy males had rumbled away in Dan's pickup, Dipper and Wendy cleaned up the table and put the meager leftovers—with Dan, leftovers rarely got left over—in the fridge. He helped her vacuum and tidy up, and by eight they had the Corduroy house in good order.

"Whoosh!" Wendy said, putting the vacuum cleaner away. "I'm glad the boys are finally picking up after themselves. Makes maintaining Casa Catastrophe just a little easier. Hey, time for the bargain-basement movie!"

Since Dan was not there to object, they went into Wendy's room to watch it. This night's epic was  _Gatornado,_ about a freak tornado that swept up a swamp full of alligators and, and as the pre-movie teaser scenes made clear, deposited them in inopportune places, like an amusement park, a raucous teen pool party, an outdoor wedding, and a movie theater showing  _Gatornado._  "Now," Dipper said, "this is meta!"

Dipper didn't drink at all, and Wendy only very occasionally snuck about a half-can of beer—usually when her family was making her especially insane. The two teens didn't have or want a drinking game.

Instead they lately had decided on kissing games. "OK, dude," Wendy said after the opening credits started to roll, "Every time a gator chomps somebody, we kiss."

Dipper rubbed his hands together, imitating Stan. In a fake rumbly voice, he said, "I like those odds!"

Immediately after the title credits ended, a hapless actor dressed as a park ranger and riding in an airboat took out a walkie-talkie—"Dude, don't you have a cell phone?" Wendy asked—and said into it, "Headquarters? This is Ranger Ricky. Listen, the weather's turning bad fast. Think I should herd Old Snatcher into a holding pen?"

Headquarters said yes, he approached an obviously fake alligator the size of a dump truck, and just as the ranger leaned out of the boat and with a long pole started to prod the unresponsive reptile, a lighting streak flashed in the sky, thunder boomed, and the startled animal (it looked like they had switched to footage of a live alligator) reacted in the only possible way that made sense—it grabbed the ranger (or maybe a Ken doll dressed up like him) and swallowed him head-first.

"Yay! Wendy cheered. "Go, gator! Pucker up, Dipper!"

"Dipper smooch!" Dipper pronounced in a Hulk voice.

They kissed, and their touch-telepathy let them feel each other's emotions.

Wendy licked her lips. "Well," she said, raising her eyebrows. "That was extra-nice. Now I know that cute little blonde stranger hasn't turned your head."

"Shh," Dipper said. "I think that gator's gonna chomp the fat man."

* * *

 

**10: On the Run**

A nice thing about Sunday mornings was that the Shack didn't open for business until 1:30 PM, since the Ramirezes always went to Mass. Dipper slept in until eight-thirty, unheard-of in the Grunkle Stan days, and then got up and in a pleasantly leisurely way began to get ready for his morning run with Wendy.

Mabel popped in just after he pulled his running shorts on, fortunately, and she threw herself onto her old bed, which made a sproingy sound. "That was  _such_  a good movie!" she said. "You and Wendy have got to go see it!"

"Maybe tomorrow," Dipper said, pulling his tee shirt over his head.

Mabel giggled. "You're getting as hairy as Grunkle Stan!"

"Yech! Hey, Mabel, do you have any lip balm?"

"Just a sec!" She sprang off the bed, out the door, and clattered down the stairs. By the time he had his running shoes tied, she was back, holding an assortment of little round tins with brightly-colored tops. "OK, Broseph, this red one's cherry, this pink one's strawberry, this one's passion fruit, and this one is mint. Take your pick."

He reached for the green tin of mint-flavored balm, dipped his pinky into the waxy contents, and smoothed it on.

"How'd you get chapped lips, anyhow?" Mabel asked.

"It involves alligators," he said.

She gave him a pop-eyed look of puzzlement. "Big-lipped alligators?"

Dipper smacked his greasy-feeling lips. The mint taste was pretty strong. "What? No, just your ordinary flying kind. So was Teek right about the movie?"

"Oh," Mabel said, flipping around so her head dangled off the edge of the bed and her hair brushed the floor, "it was  _so_  good! This girl, about our age, her family moves? Despite the fact that she's so good at ice hockey! And all the little people who live in her head go nuts and things, and the bridges all fall! The imaginary friend dies falling out of a little red wagon! Then she decides to run away from San Francisco, but Sadness steps in on the bus, and OMG, I laughed, I cried, Teek had to hold me, it was so freakin'  _good!_  Take Wendy to see it!"

"With that plot summary, how can I resist?" Dipper asked. He reached for the doorknob. "Want to come and run with us this morning?"

Mabel flipped around until she was right-side up in the bed again. "Nope! Gonna spend some quality time with Waddles and Widdles. I've been neglecting them lately."

"Happy pigging, then," Dipper said, heading downstairs and then out to the lawn.

Wendy showed up as he started his stretches. "Pretty nice night last night, wasn't it?" she asked, grinning. She was in her red running shorts, red shoes, and red headband. And, of course, her white top.

Dipper, doing lunges, said, "Yep." Before Wendy could begin her own stretches, Dipper straightened up, strode toward her, took her shoulders in his hands, and kissed her.

Her green eyes opened wide. "Mm-what, dude? Hey! Mint! You—wait, man, are your lips chapped, too?"

"Too many alligators," he said, grinning. "Mabel has some lip balm if you need it."

"Well—I put some plain petroleum jelly on this morning, but that mint's awfully tempting! I'll run and ask her for some."

Dipper was doing a set of side-stretches when he heard Mabel's triumphant shout from inside the Shack: "You too? That's some high-powered kissage! Way to go!"

A minute later, Wendy came out, laughing. "Man, your sister has, like,  _no_  inhibitions about being a teen girl, does she?"

"Nope," Dipper said. "Hey, want to do the nature trail again this morning? We've been doing the easy run through town the last few days, but today I'm feeling good!"

"You're on," Wendy said, and she hurried into her stretching routine.

Dipper, a sprinter, had to ease back into cross-country distance running. After three weeks of it, though, he'd settled into the old groove, and now he could match Wendy's long-legged strides pace for pace for four miles without gasping and panting. It always pleased him when, about a third of the way into the run, he got his second wind and like magic, everything, breathing, running, talking, suddenly seemed easier. It felt more like a change in the world than in himself: gravity loosened its hold a bit, the earth became springy, the air refreshed and filled his lungs in a way it hadn't before.

He had a sense of déjà vu, though it hadn't been a week since they last ventured on this trail. The pleasures of the run all came back to him, each time like the others but also unique. Same-y, as Mabel said, but also different-y. It was a morning of bright, broken clouds, cool, the ground damp but not muddy underfoot, the June-green trees scenting the air with balsam and pine sap. Birds twittered, woodpeckers rapped, and squirrels chattered as they passed. Their gently rolling trail took them across flower-sprinkled meadows, along the edge of a gurgling creek, and then up a wide, mounded hill knee-deep in sweet-smelling grass. When they crested it, they gazed down into a bowl-like valley where Moon Trap Pond, small and perfectly round, mirror-reflected the sky.

They ran around the pond, then uphill to the Lonesome Man, an anomaly—not a supernatural one, but an archaeological or maybe geological oddity, a standing stone like those you'd find in Brittany and in the British Isles, the ones contemporaneous with the construction of Stonehenge.

Native American legends—supposedly, you could never be sure when any given Gravity Falls legend might actually have been started by Stanley Pines—said the stone was a transformed Chinook warrior or prince whose bride—it was a forced marriage—had fled from him on their wedding night. Both had prayed to the moon for help, and the moon favored her, and to let her escape a match she didn't want, changed him into the six-foot tall, forward-leaning stone.

Unlike the Talking Rock, this one bore no pictographs. It was too far from the Shack to be on the Nature Trail, and so Grunkle Stan hadn't enhanced it.

Still, Dipper kept thinking he ought to come out and examine the Lonesome Man more carefully, perhaps with Grunkle Ford's help.

"So," Wendy said as they started back, "you gonna give me the rest of the lake monster book to read?"

"Got the last three chapters revised," he said. "Let me print them out. You can take them home this evening. Thanks for critiquing."

"I'm not finding much," Wendy said. "'Cept once you slipped up and called Willow Wendy."

"Hard not to," Dipper said. "How's the crush bit?"

Wendy chuckled. "Lots better! Alexis doesn't spend most of his time moping 'cause Willow's too old and cool for him."

"He's still got a crush on her, though," Dipper said.

"Yeah. Give you a few thoughts on that. Not for this book, maybe the next one, 'cause it's like an arc. You gonna deal with Gideon? I noticed you mentioned a kid psychic named Gabriel."

"Don't know if I'm gonna go into the whole Gabriel-loves-Alexa thing so much," Dipper said. "Might embarrass Mabel."

"She's gotta know she's the model for Alexa."

"Oh, she does. But, you know, it was an uncomfortable thing for her. I'm gonna do a haunted wax museum one next, I think. Maybe make Gabriel's crush a little part of that one."

"What're you gonna do when you run through everything that happened that first summer?" Wendy asked.

"Stop writing and retire on my royalties!" Dipper said.

They walked from the bonfire glade back to the Shack, where they had a late breakfast, and Mabel came in for a second breakfast. She again gushed about the movie she and Teek had seen, and Dipper and Wendy said they'd take in a matinee the next day. "Me and Teek will go see it again with you!" Mabel said. "Double date! Wooo!"

It was almost time for Soos and his family to return from Mass when Dipper got a phone call. "Grunkle Ford," he said, recognizing the ring tone. "Hello?"

"Dipper," Ford said, "first of all, I'm all right."

"Huh? What happened?"

Catching Dipper's urgency, Mabel asked, "What?"

Wendy shushed her and looked at Dipper with concern.

Ford was talking: "It's too complicated to explain over the phone. I'm going to drive to the Mystery Shack. I'd bring Stanley, but he and Sheila are off on a weekend trip. Anyway, can you and perhaps Wendy and Mabel make time to hear me out?"

"Yeah, sure," Dipper said. "We've got nearly two hours before the Shack opens."

"I'll be there in ten minutes," Ford promised, and then he hung up.

"Dipper?" Mabel asked.

He shook his head and told them Ford was on his way. "I guess," he finished, "we'll find out what's up when he gets here."

* * *

"And when I received the call from London yesterday evening," Ford finished, "I realized that the man I thought was Dr. Helving was an impostor." He looked grim. "I am all but certain the real Dr. Helving died, an apparent suicide. Threw himself off a highway bridge. But I have reason to believe he was under some sort of mind control."

"What, like hypnotized?" Wendy asked.

They were down on the second basement level, clustered around the small conference table. The harsh fluorescent light made them all look pale. Slowly, Ford said, "Not exactly, Wendy. Something  _like_  hypnosis, I think, but magically induced. More like the man behind it all had a way of making the real Helving his puppet."

Mabel shot a worried glance at Dipper, who had a strong aversion to puppets. He just shook his head.

"Wait, you lost me, dude," Wendy said. "You got a call from London that came from—who?"

"From Dr. Helving's secretary and assistant, a gentleman named Brierly. Helving had let him know that he would be coming to visit me, and my number and contact information were in Helving's files. Helving was supposed to have called Brierly to let him know his schedule once he'd talked to me, but the call never came. I told Brierly that I had picked Helving up at the airport and that, in fact, the man was probably asleep after all his jet travel, first from London to Chicago for a conference, and then from Chicago to Oregon."

"But that man wasn't Helving?" Dipper asked.

"Assuredly not, Mason. I dropped a chance remark that I'd expected Helving to be older, and Brierly, surprised, asked me how old I thought he was. I guessed fifty. Brierly sent—is the word texted? It is? Odd when it's an image and not actual text, but—anyway, he texted me a photograph, and the old man in the picture was  _not_ the man I had driven back from the airport!"

"I think I see where this is going," Mabel said. "Mabel no like!"

"I made a few more calls," Ford said. "To my horror, I learned about the death of a man who had leaped off a highway bridge in Portland. The clincher was that the man apparently had dropped a pair of spectacles with a specific combination of elements in its construction. Brierly had told me that Helving had spent almost the entire past year in Brussels, and the spectacles, I discovered, were available only in Belgium. A Detective Rao in Portland is working on my tip and will attempt to make a DNA identification, but—well, the man's death is my fault, I fear."

"You didn't know," Dipper said.

"Thank you. I should have been more careful after learning that much, but I acted imprudently then," Ford admitted. I'd been up all night, I was racked by guilt at possibly having summoned Dr. Helving to a place where he would meet his death, and by then it was early morning. I knocked on the impostor's door and confronted him. He gave me a gaze of such hatred—I've rarely seen anything like it, even in the War Dimensions. Anyway, I hadn't come armed, and he attempted to ensorcell me."

"The who with the which now?" Mabel asked.

Ford waved his hand. "To—to bewitch me, to place me under a spell. I felt it dragging at my mind, but it couldn't take hold. He did slow me, prevented me from calling for help, long enough for him to flee. He left behind all his luggage—actually, Dr. Helving's luggage. I'm not sure how he escaped, but he got out of the mansion, and by the time I could move freely again, he was gone."

"Wow," Dipper said. "You were lucky."

"I don't think it was luck," Ford said. "I believe it was an effect of the metal plate in my skull. It was strong enough to resist Bill Cipher—and it's certainly strong enough to resist the power of an earthly sorcerer."

"Do you think he got away?" Mabel asked. "Do you need a grappling hook?"

"Thanks for the kind thought, but grappling hooks can't help us now."

"Us?" Wendy asked, reaching to take Dipper's hand.

"Us," Ford said. "I'm afraid we're all in for trouble. I'll tell you about my theory, but first—well, look at this." He reached into his coat and produced a folded piece of paper. "The impostor forgot to pick this up as he ran. He accidentally left it behind."

He unfolded the document and laid it on the table.

"Oh, no," Dipper groaned. "Oh, no, no no!" He felt like someone on a peaceful seashore who had just noticed an enormous, unavoidable dark wave rushing in, ready to crush him. The shore was the present. The wave—the wave was the worst memory the terrified figure on the shore had from the past.

Because the sheet held only one thing—a drawing in black ink, drawn with a broad-nibbed pen. A circle with the rim divided into ten sections. Each section was marked with a rune—and, in nearly calligraphic letters inked in black, a name.

_Pines Stl_

_Pines Stf_

_Pines Mb_

_Pines Ms?_

_Corduroy_

_Gleeful_

_Northwest !_

_McGucket !_

_Ramirez (?)_

_Valentino/O'Grady?_

"Cipher's Zodiac," Wendy said.

And in a small voice, Mabel said, "Oh, my God. Teek!"

"I think," Ford said heavily, "that we face an adversary who possesses uncanny powers. And I'm afraid we may all be involved in a fight for our very lives."

* * *

_The End_

(But that wave is going to break soon. . . . )


End file.
